A winning combination

JONATHAN Morton has made a habit of coming up with unusual and fascinating combinations as artistic director of the Scottish Ensemble, and "Baltic Renaissance" is no exception.

Morton’s idea for the concert was to pair contemporary music from the Baltic with early English music, a less than immediately obvious match-up and arguably even more of a stretch than the excellent Mendelssohn and Stravinsky programme on their last visit to Eden Court.

"I’m getting more and more into connections that aren’t obvious," he admitted.

"As a musician I am always happy to move on once I have done something and as artistic director I find it most interesting to come up with things people don’t expect. It does leave the nagging concern that in actual fact it might not work — I worried about that a little with the Mendelssohn and Stravinsky last time, but in fact it seemed to work very well for people."

"Baltic Renaissance" will feature relatively rarely heard music by four composers, of which Arvo Pärt’s "Fratres" is by far the best known. It will be heard alongside Erkki-Sven Tuur’s "Action and Illusion", Bronius Kutavicius’s "Northern Gates of Jerusalem" and Peteris Vasks’s "Distant Light", a violin concerto with Morton as soloist.

"There has been something of a renaissance in Baltic arts since the break-up of the Soviet Union," he explained.

"Part of that is a rich body of music for strings. Much of it isn’t well known, although Pärt’s music is very popular with all kinds of listeners not just followers of classical music.

"When we did some Pärt at the Kelvingrove Museum earlier in the year, people were queuing round the block to get in. His music is very powerful to a lot of people, and I wanted to acknowledge that while broadening the focus."

The Baltic works will be interspersed with early English string music of the 15th and 16th centuries by William Byrd and Henry Purcell. For Morton, though, the boundaries are far from clear-cut.

"Putting them together was partly to turn things on their head," he said.

"It struck me that some of the contemporary Baltic music sounds rather ancient, while to my ears Byrd and Purcell sound more and more modern.

"I wanted to challenge expectations of what the music of these two periods might sound like and how people might think about that. More and more I believe that thinking in that linear chronological way is perhaps not that helpful. I hope people will enjoy the experience."

?

The Scottish Ensemble appears at the OneTouch Theatre, Eden Court, on Thursday at 8pm.

Scottish Ensemble’s Candlelight Concert programme

Kutavicius — "Northern Gates of Jerusalem"

Byrd — "Fantasia a 6 no 2 in G"

Pärt — "Fratres"

Purcell — "Dance of the Furies"

Tüür — "Action and Illusion"

Purcell — "Fantasia on one note"

Vasks — "Distant Light" (soloist Jonathan Morton).