Music review: SCO & Sir James MacMillan, Queen's Hall, Edinburgh

SCO & Sir James MacMillan, Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh *****

With its clanking beer bottles and clattering pots and pans, not to mention its floor-shaking hammer blows, there was plenty of visceral violence in Death in a Nutshell, the dazzling and macabre new suite of six miniatures commissioned by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra from young Ayrshire-born composer Jay Capperauld, and given its world premiere at the Queen’s Hall. Capperauld seems to delight in his grisly, perhaps unlikely subject matter, taking inspiration from doll’s house-sized murder scenes lovingly constructed in the 1940s and 50s by Frances Glessner Lee and still used to train US detectives today.

Accordingly, he has laced his madcap, helter-skelter music with clues and leads, teasing the listener to solve the mysteries of the wife found dead in her kitchen next to a freshly baked apple pie, or the half-drunk party girl discovered drowned in her own bath. But amid all the frenzied collisions of styles and material – from film noir soundtracks to Psycho-era Bernard Herrmann to sleazy jazz (a brilliantly gutsy sax solo from Lewis Banks) – there was enormous subtlety, too. The gently swaying string harmonies capturing an elderly spinster found hanging in her own attic made for a grotesquely beautiful, surprisingly moving conclusion. Indeed, it speaks to Capperauld’s mastery of his material that Death in a Nutshell managed to be funny, clever, dark and very poignant all at the same time – as well as scored with unbridled sonic imagination.

Conducted by Sir James MacMillan, the SCO musicians played with such blistering energy, commitment and insight that it felt as though they’d known Death in a Nutshell for decades rather than weeks. MacMillan began the concert far more quietly, with a Mahler Symphony No. 5 Adagietto and a Wagner Siegfried Idyll tenderly shaped and sculpted, and an Ives Unanswered Question that sent trumpeter Peter Franks up to the Queen’s Hall’s balcony to pose his gnomic query. It was a concert of profound investigations, and vivid responses.

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