John McLeod’s latest work, commissioned from the 80-year-old Scottish composer by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra for performance in January, is both timely and apt. A tribute to the volatile Dane, Carl Nielsen, whose 150th anniversary falls in 2015 along with that of Sibelius, it is piquantly entitled Out of the Silence and takes the form of an imagined conversation - unpredictable and disputatious - between Nielsen and McLeod himself, thereby anticipating a request in the latest issue of Standpoint magazine for Nielsen, rather than Sibelius, to be the focus of attention in the coming year.
Given the choice between the two Nordic composers for his tribute, McLeod, a third Nordic composer, had no difficulty making his decision. The quirky, maverick Nielsen was his man. Sibelius, in comparison, seemed too stern and awe-inspiring, and what McLeod has produced is in many ways a merry, as well as sympathetic, portrait filled with the warmth and diversity of Nielsen himself.
Significantly it is not a theme and variations - the traditional tribute from one composer to another - but a response to two of Nielsen’s works, the Inextinguishable Symphony and the Clarinet Concerto, which hover and tumble and explode around McLeod’s score like aspects of the Northern Lights - apart from the fact that McLeod’s music, like Nielsen’s, is full of humanity.
I first heard a Nielsen symphony during my adolescence, when Walter Susskind and what is now the RSNO performed the Sinfonia Espansiva in the early 1950s. When Leonard Bernstein recorded the same work, along with the other symphonies, a decade later, it sounded much tamer. Bernstein was a conductor you had to see in order to savour. But Nielsen still stands in need of the devotion Susskind and Bernstein gave him. Which, of course, is one reason for McLeod’s forthcoming tribute - which will be played, with Joseph Swensen as conductor, alongside Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto and Sibelius’s very different Symphony No 4 - as well as for the article in Standpoint.
18 December 2014
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