Music
Scottish Ensemble
Glasgow Science Centre
Keith Bruce, four stars
THERE was a great deal on the agenda for performers and audience at Glasgow Science Centre, as the Scottish Ensemble presented its latest programme, entitled Pause, also destined for Aberdeen and Edinburgh before the end of the week.
Devised by violinist Daniel Pioro, leader of chamber group The Fibonacci Sequence, with contributions from cognitive neuro-scientist Dr Guido Orgs as well as Ensemble leader Jonathan Morton, chief executive Jenny Jamison and Pioro himself, it attempted to consider how music works on the human brain and how we listen to music.
While the musicians talked of the personal, and sought to relate their creation process directly to the active listening of the audience, Dr Orgs cited research that covered the perceived sexual attractiveness of musicians, the anaesthetic properties of singing in a choir, and even the necessity for an appetite for arts and culture alongside food and having children as an essential element of human existence.
Of course he was preaching to the converted, and the music on the menu aimed to cater to wide tastes. John Cage’s notorious 4’33”, carefully introduced by Morton, must rarely have been heard in such a prepared context, positioned between a virtuoso performance of Philip Glass’s Knee Play 2, from the opera Einstein on the Beach, and the newest piece on the programme, Peter Gregson’s Warmth.
In fact the Cage (from 1952) sat apart in time, in a recital that began with the broad palettes of possible sound indicated by the different compositional techniques of Caroline Shaw and Pauline Oliveros before finding earlier parallel delights in Biber’s first Rosary Sonata and Pioro’s own arrangements of Indian raga and plainchant, filtered through his knowledge of 20th century composers La Monte Young and Jonathan Harvey. The second half’s modernity was bracketed by a glorious 12 minutes of Handel and new piece by Rune Tonsgaard Sorensen of the Danish Quartet, which Pioro accurately described as “pure joy in music.”
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