Saturday night was my last Winter Season concert with the RSNO. A major landmark for me as, though I still have 3 months until my sabbatical starts, I won’t appear on the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall stage for another 10 months or so!
It’s also focused my mind on my upcoming concert in Kinbuck on 20th August and I thought it would be good just to take a quick look at what repertoire I’ve managed to gather.
First of all, a few months ago, I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough repertoire to sustain a whole concert and now I’m having to narrow it down! There really is a lot of viola music originating from the North Atlantic countries.
Last week I got together with two of my colleagues, Helen Brew (flute) and David Hubbard (bassoon) to try Kari Bæk’s “Vár Trio”. We liked it and they’ve kindly agreed to join me in my concert. My husband, David, will also join us on the viola. I love the possibilities and challenges that this particular grouping presents and I think it is a nice combination for the darker shades of Nordic music.
The Kinbuck concert will be a journey in music, words and images through the countries I am visiting and my repertoire choices reflect that, with a variety of traditional and contemporary tunes.
The repertoire list, subject to change, is looking like this:
From Scotland: a selection of tunes from Shetland, my own “Winter Melancholy” for solo viola and Peter Maxwell Davies’ beautiful “Farewell to Stromness”.
From the Faroes: Kari Bæk’s “Vár Trio”, Kristian Blak’s “Drrrunnn” and the traditional tune, “God nat og farvel”
From Iceland: Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson’s “Fiðlufrænkur” – a collection of Icelandic traditional tunes.
From Denmark/Greenland: Poul Ruders’ “Autumn Collection” and an original Inuit song with an improvisation.
There is lots and lots more music that I am still to learn and in the future I’m looking to a concert using a string quartet, trio and various duo combinations and also viola and piano/harpsichord/organ. I’ll talk about that another day!
nordicviola 