Queen’s Hall, 26/3/2026
Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Andrew Manze conductor, SCO Chorus, Gregory Batsleer director, Roderick Williams Baritone
Jay Capperauld’s oratorio ‘The Language of Eden’ gives this concert its name. The world premiere, the product of a fruitful collaboration between two Scots, Jay Capperauld and Niall Campbell seems in form and subject-matter well-placed in a programme of works from the English pastoral tradition.
A packed auditorium faces a crowded stage – the SCO Chorus behind the orchestra with an array of percussion on the left, preventing entrance from the side door, and with the first violins almost sitting on the laps of the front row. Andrew Manze conducts from space between the strings and pays tribute to wordsmiths who act as librettists tonight: Shakespeare, A E Houseman and Niall Campbell – to whom he adds David Kettle whose programme notes add to our appreciation of concerts every week.
Vaughan Williams’s ‘Serenade to Music’ was written as a choral work for 16 solo singers and is based on the moonlit exchange between Jessica and Lorenzo in ‘The Merchant of Venice’. Commissioned in 1938, the composer’s personal impetus was almost certainly his recently begun love affair with Ursula Woods, later his second wife. The work’s lyricism surprised critics who’d been equally puzzled by the harsh turn of his earlier 1930s compositions. An introduction for harp, woodwind and strings, with a rhapsodic solo for guest leader Pablo Hernán Benedi leads into a choral section, which divides into the original solo parts, sung by groups of 4 or 5 singers. The upper sopranos sing a repeated rising motif which contrasts with the lowest male voices lingering in the depths on the “affectations dark as Erebus”. Trumpet, horns and triangle herald a change to a quicker pace on “Come, ho, and wake Diana with a kiss”. Vaughan Williams focuses on the beauty of sound in the singing and orchestration. The combination of flutes and horns – a feature of three works tonight – create warmth and joy.
50 years earlier Elgar was relative unknown when he wrote his serenade for a local orchestra. Though turned down by publishers, he said later that it was the first work he’d been wholly pleased with. Written for strings its three movements include a cheerful cantering figure on the strings in the first and third movements and a melodic slow movement. Unusually Andrew Manze keeps all the musicians on stage throughout the concert, so the 24 strings play surrounded by the rest of the band and the chorus behind. This reduces the time lags between works, but I wonder if the serenade might have benefited from more space and elbow room.
When George Butterworth enlisted, aged 30, in the Durham Light Infantry in 1914, he had already set two groups of poems from A E Houseman’s 1896 ‘A Shropshire Lad’. Though none of the songs is a copy of an existing folk sing, Butterworth, like his friend and fellow song collector Vaughan Williams, was influenced by their structures and melodic patterns sense of a communal enterprise in his music. Butterworth’s death inevitably influences our experience listening to the songs. Roderick Williams is an ideal singer, especially clear and poignant in the intimate atmosphere of the Queen’s Hall. His own orchestral accompaniment works well for the earlier songs, but is, I think, over-dramatic in the last song. In ‘Loveliest of trees’, the orchestration is lush with harp and four horns. The bitterly ironic ‘Think no more lad’ is taken at a brisk pace, with mock military accompaniment of trumpets and drums. ‘The Lads in their hundreds’ has a repeated tune, like a folk song, and benefits from a simple setting with a nice flute obbligato in the first verse. However, the devastating last verse is served so well by Butterworths’s own austere piano accompaniment with its pattern of chords subtly changing to accommodate the different “voices” of the dead man and his living friend that I’m afraid strings and horns, with a drum roll towards the end, didn’t work for me. A pity.
‘The Representation of ‘Chaos’ from Haydn’s ‘Creation’ attempts to represent in sound the unformed state of matter, which precedes the thrilling and comic later sounds of the first seven days. Here it stands alone to prepare us for Jay Capperauld’s oratorio, a new kind of creation myth for orchestra, choir and baritone soloist. He and librettist Niall Campbell have worked together before (their short choral work ‘The Night Watch’ is now online in the SCO’s digital series.) In answering the question, how did man start to speak, Capperauld was influenced by a Scottish language experiment in which James IV set two new-borns on Inchkeith with a deafmute wet-nurse. His hope that they would thus learn to speak Hebrew wasn’t realised! ‘The Language of Eden’ imagines an island, Eden, which speaks with one voice (the Chorus) to educate a man Adam (Roderick Williams). House lights are on so that we can follow the six-page libretto. Part one ‘Creation and Questions’ has Adam and the Island Eden exchange questions and answers. The island, the choir singing in unison, is reassuring “I will tell you everything you need to know”, and Adam is open to learning, “make of me a blank page and write in me everything I should know”. Despite the oddities of the situation, the work is entirely accessible musically and in its philosophy. Part two, ‘Four Elements’ contains the most interesting music, when the choir and orchestra use non-conventional sounds, and movements (stamping, clapping) to illustrate air, earth, fire and water. For example, the air section requires the wind players to blow over the mouth pieces of their instruments, while the names for air in different languages are spoken quickly by choir members, the sound rippling around.
Adam’s responses are longer, and more poetic, and he is accompanied by a musical alter ego, Fraser Kelman on cor anglais. Although Capperauld has said he used “the kitchen sink” rule of orchestration, it’s notable that much care is taken to get the rights sounds – a sand shaker is added to the choir’s air-borne susurrations. The last two sections see Adam leave the island and learn to sing. As Humanity approaches, there’s babble in the choir as Williams’ voice soars in a wordless vocalise and elegiac farewells.
Andrew Manze keeps this complex work thought-provoking and lucid. Like others of Capperauld’s compositions, I think it has a future!