Alan Cooper reviews: John McLeod, a composer portrait
Lunchbreaks at Cowdray Hall in association with sound
JOHN McLEOD: A COMPOSER PORTRAIT
TO CELEBRATE HIS 80TH BIRTHDAY
Young Artists play McLEOD
IAN WATT: Guitar
PHILIP SHARP: Piano
COWDRAY HALL
Thursday, 06 November 2014
It is hard to believe that Aberdeen born composer John McLeod has reached his 80th birthday this year. He was present in the Cowdray Hall to hear two inspired young musicians play a selection of his music dating from 1978 to 2012. Dr Roger Williams introduced a vigorous McLeod who looked at least twenty years younger than his listed age. With Dr Williams he took part in a short pre-concert question and answer session that revealed something of the composer’s early musical inspirations from when he was a pupil at Aberdeen Grammar School as well as some fascinating details regarding the composition of some of the pieces we were about to hear – in particular the composer’s initiation into the art of writing specifically for the guitar – more about that later.
Aberdeen concert audiences are well aware of the matchless instrumental mastery of our Aberdeenshire born guitar virtuoso Ian Watt. Philip Sharp was new to me but his pianistic virtuosity certainly lived up to Ian’s guitar playing so we hope he will be invited back to play in the Lunchbreak Series or at the University again soon.
It was Philip Sharp whose performance opened the recital with McLeod’s Three Protest Pieces (1992 revised in 1999) for piano. These, the composer explained, were his “green” pieces written as an alternative to going on marches or signing petitions. They are certainly more memorable and will be much longer lasting than these other two alternatives. The titles are as follows: (a). The fox, in agony, surrenders his blood to the night. (b). A mountain stream, poisoned and choked with effluents, struggles to reach the sea, and (c). The Stag, its heart pierced by an arrow, disappears into the mist. The titles alone conjure up some very clear images that make very obvious the composer’s concerns. The spiky incisive modernism of the music clearly conveys the composer’s sense of outrage and commitment. These are dramatic pieces of music with angry chords and trenchant lines that match the graphic images delivered by the titles but in all three pieces there were also significant passages of delicate, sensitive and transparent piano writing that were beautifully conveyed to the audience by Philip Sharp’s sensitive and perceptive playing.
Ian Watt’s first contribution to the programme was Fantasy on themes from Britten’s “Gloriana” (2012) for guitar. McLeod has managed to capture Britten’s modern recasting of early music such as the Morris Dance and Pavane in this piece. As Ian Watt himself writes in the accompanying programme note: “The work showcases the instrument as a miniature orchestra”. Ian mentions fanfares, flute and even a brass ensemble. What wonderfully colourful piece of writing for guitar this was! It encapsulated the ideas of operatic drama and pageantry to perfection including the use of the guitar body to produce percussive effects.
Ian, on brilliant form, continued the performance with Three Mythical Pieces (2012) for guitar. All three pieces featured graphically colourful guitar writing – the harp-like chordings in Amphion’s Lyre, the scurrying, scampering lines of Salamander suggesting the lizard’s feet rushing hither and thither through fire and finally and most magical of all, the quietly pensive sense of labyrinthine searching in Ariadne. Above all, these pieces, the Britten Fantasy every bit as much as the Mythical Pieces were marvellously well scored for guitar – the sort of pieces that any really talented guitarist would love to be able to play. Perhaps though, they would have to be as brilliant as Ian Watt in order to give the wonderfully detailed and multicoloured performance that he did.
Philip Sharp was back at the piano for the final piece in the programme. This was McLeod’s Piano Sonata No.1 – a brilliant modern recasting of the idea of Sonata form. There were echos of the technical virtuosity of composer-pianists like Liszt and even Rachmaninov in this music. Exciting rhythmic chording contrasted with expansive melody with all the following musical development leading inexorably, or so it seemed, as we were led there by McLeod, to an exhilarating fun-ride of a fugato and a terrifyingly virtuosic ending. Philip Sharp’s amazing performance confirmed just what a wonderful piece this is – the work of a composer who knows his piano literature inside out and is able to stamp his own personality on a new way of looking at it. This was a true generation spanning musical performance. It gave us a youthful sounding McLeod delivered by two young performers with amazing technical and musical maturity.
© Alan Cooper
