A month-long residency with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra by dynamic Finnish violinist and conductor Pekka Kuusisto is ending in a programme featuring two UK premieres – a violin concerto written for him by Anna Clyne and a song cycle composed by Helen Grime for the other featured soloist, soprano Ruby Hughes. Add in fiddler Aidan O’Rourke duetting with Kuusisto on some of the folk tunes used by Clyne in her five-movement work, Time and Tides, and an interval set on the decks by Andy Levy, AKA DJ Dolphin Boy, and it looked like a long and rather eclectic evening. Instead it flowed with an easy sense of purpose.
Grime sets three poems about happiness, Larkin’s joy in springtime, Coming, finding perhaps surprising company in verses by American writers Sandra Cisneros and Jane Hirshfield. Grime’s music matches the words – becoming more abstract through the sequence, but Hughes was in complete command of the work’s tonal and dynamic range, the drama of the delicious vocabulary and the kinship to improvisatory jazz. With just 14 string players, Kuusisto’s violin was a spare foil to her voice.
