John McLeod at 80

Today I go to the Tusitala restaurant in Fairmilehead, its name a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson, one-time resident of the village of Swanston on the fringe of the Pentlands nearby. Tusitala, aptly, is Samoan for story-teller, and it was among these Pacific islands that the Edinburgh-born writer spent his last years, dying there on his 400-acre estate in 1894.  It is not a Scottish author, however, but a Scottish composer, John McLeod, with whom I am lunching. Now eighty, and still very spry, he has lived much longer than Stevenson, and in his latest works he has reached a new, conspicuously inspired and fecund period of creativity. 

I have been celebrating his birthday with a 3000-word article for the London magazine Musical Opinion which, with Bob Matthew-Walker as editor,  has become a hugely enhanced version of its somewhat dry old self. John was eighty in March, and in tribute to him Donald Runnicles and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra are performing his tone poem, The Sun Dances, at the BBC Proms in August. 

Though he composed it fourteen years ago for the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, the work is one of the turning points in his output, whereby he changed from being a good composer into a masterly one. Janacek, whose music McLeod greatly admires, developed similarly in his old age. 

The Sun Dances, it seems to me,  is one of the first works in which he showed himself to be a Scottish colourist in the same way as painters such as Peploe, Cadell, Fergusson, Redpath and Gillies established themselves as Scottish colourists and are now known by that title.  McLeod was a colourist long before he composed The Sun Dances, of course, but the colours in recent years have sharpened and intensified, so that they become the foreground of his music rather than the background. 

At the same time, his style has become more pared down - think of Debussy and Sibelius in their later years - and this is another fascinating facet of his recent output. Even his titles - Chinese Whispers, Haflidi’s Pictures, Symphonies of Stone and Water, Out of the Silence - contribute to the effect. The Sun Dances are not dances. The music represents a vision of the sun through the eyes of an old Scottish woman long ago  on the top of Benmore on Easter Sunday. She has the experience only once in her life but the colours of the sunrise - “green, purple, red, blood-red, white, intense-whiie and gold-white” - stay with her for ever. This is what McLeod’s music depicts and what shows him to be now a colourist of the choicest sort.

Our lunch at Tusitala is in keeping. John’s smoked salmon, served with a separate white dressing on a square white plate, is like an abstract comment on his music (my own tub of mussels, though no more than a tub of mussels, tastes just as it should). Our glasses of chilled Chilean sauvignon bring with them a tang of Stevenson’s Pacific, reminding us why this sunny, spacious, good-tempered restaurant is so-named.

15 May 2014