RSNO Shetland debut goes down a storm

The RSNO have just made their first visit to Shetland in 21 years. Tim Cornwell joined them for some very unusual experiences

For a stranger to Shetland, St Columba’s Kirk is so plain and unadorned, that on an afternoon of dodging blowy rain you could walk right past it, not realising the great grey shed is actually a church. The story was different last Friday; parked outside the front door of Lerwick’s Big Kirk was the white lorry of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, with the logo emblazoned on the side.

Inside, a horseshoe balcony, yellow, white, and red-trimmed decor, and neoclassical arches of a building designed by the Edinburgh architect James Milne, created an intimate and elegant space that put Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall to shame.

In the Big Kirk Chamber Concert, leader James Clark was both soloist and timekeeper for Mozart’s Violin Concert No 1; he’d had admiring reviews for the same work in the Edinburgh International Festival. The RNSO musicians don’t typically play as a chamber orchestra, with no conductor, and the piece struggled a little. Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, that followed, was a delight, and the repertoire also included Edvard Grieg’s Holberg suite, a popular piece by the Norwegian composer well-known for his use of folk tunes. This blending of traditional and classical music was a running theme of the RSNO’s five-day visit to the islands, and it’s also a nod to their very Scandinavian identity.

The night before, with just four RSNO players, we were in Unst, the northernmost inhabited island of the British Isles, where the population has halved in recent decades after the loss of an RAF listening base. The Outer Isles Project was an attempt to link, through music, four islands roughly on the compass points of the Shetlands – Unst, Skerries, Fair Isle and Foula. From each, RSNO musicians, alongside local fiddlers and singers, played their own variations on the melody of Tingaholm, a new piece for the orchestra by Shetland fiddler and composer Chris Stout. Playing live to island audiences, mostly in school halls, they were linked by internet broadcasts, to meld the pieces into a single concert.

By the end of the weekend, the musicians certainly had one thing in common: serious concern about the provision of music lessons in the islands. The introduction of charges brought a island-wide uproar last year. Now, with more council cuts on the way, there’s talk of further limiting tuition to just fiddle and piano, and worry about the impact of short 25-minute lessons on a community that has made music a tradition and selling point.

“It’s a scary time for music in Shetland,” says island musician and composer Margaret Scollay. “You can shut the school, but if you lose the music, it’s ten years later you finally realise.”

Some RSNO musicians feel strongly that there is demand for and ought to be training for classical as well as island music; others that Shetland fiddling itself is a unique form that must be nurtured with care, or the loss will be felt not ten but 40 years down the line.

The musicians from tiny Fair Isle, where Stout grew up, kicked off the four-island concert. Singers Neil Thomson and Lise Sinclair offered the first taste of a simple theme that still haunted days later, set to words, first in Shetland dialect: “Nort o da staurs an ut ower d sea/ Tak a mead an mak fur heem/Fasten d compass here/ Fasten d compass here.” English words followed with the line that “nothing is north of here”. The theme was echoed on violin and bassoon. (You can hear the piece on http://soundcloud.com/lise-sinclair).

It came as no particular surprise that the broadcast connection did not really work as advertised. The video quality was, let’s say, pixellated; in Unst, the broadcasts from other islands had a jerky quality, so that at times the musicians moved like marionettes. The sound, just good enough, had the fluty quality of something that had, indeed, travelled under the sea. However, the quality of the music and enthusiasm for the occasion, carried the night.

In Unst, Scollay is the local composer. She said of Stout’s theme: “When I heard it, it reminded me of a very old melody. I heard a wedding march, or sailors lament, it’s mournful, quite sad.” The Unst variation she helped produce was played in the hall of the Baltasound Junior High School; at times, a single accordion and piano picked up Stout’s tune, and the piece ran from reels and airs to a classical arrangement by her RSNO collaborator, oboist Katy Mackintosh. In the rest of the Unst concert, the RSNO musicians played lively classical by Mozart or Gordon Jacob, while mostly teenaged Shetland fiddlers and accordionists responded with reels and waltzes.

It was a curious mix: the classical expertise can make regular reels sound plodding and cheap. When young accordionist Mathew Scollay played a rolling Norwegian waltz, it was a foot-tapping lilt that had me swaying in my seat; for the classical works, you’re supposed to sit silent and still.

The RSNO were in Shetland on their annual “Out and About” trip to a Scottish community; they’ve done Aberdeenshire, and Dumfries and Galloway in recent years. The Shetland visit, the first for the orchestra in 21 years, had a different intensity. It included over 20 events from major concerts through small recitals to creative workshops. The climactic Sunday Symphony from the full orchestra, with the swirling surges of Britten’s Four Sea Interludes to Sibelius’ tempestuous Symphony No 1, played to over 700 people (it included Stout’s full Tingaholm composition, which earned respectful rather than ecstatic applause). The school concert the next day, in the same setting of the gymnasium hall at Lerwick’s gleaming sports centre, was filled with children from all but a couple of the island’s schools. At a guess, 10-15 per cent of the island’s 22,000 population will have heard the RSNO play.

It brought some strange encounters. On the Skerries, RSNO musicians were walking the island before the rehearsal and spotted a young seal pup caught in a fishing net on the rocks. One of the first violinists, David Chivers, climbed down, grabbed hold of the net, and set the animal free, as it tried to bite his hand.

The group sent to tiny Foula, with soaring cliffs and a population of about 30, included the orchestra’s young principal trombonist, Davur Juul Magnussen, from the Faroe Islands, 220 miles north- west of Shetland, on the way to Iceland.

The tuba player, John Whitener, was originally from Maine, the US state famous for its coast and islands, with his 20kg instrument accounting for a fifth of the plane’s cargo weight. The trip was almost cancelled as a weather front moved in, and both were vital for the main concert.

In the Faroes, island music has centred on singing, and brass; it has 12 brass bands, as well as a symphony orchestra. Magnussen describes a childhood eating puffin and whale; his grandfather was a traditional kingo singer, and one highlight of the music year is a concert from boats in a giant sea cave. He can tell you the names of legendary figures in Faroe music, and the man who famously rowed to Shetland. After six years living in Scotland, he jokes about going soft.

“The only thing I can say is that having culture in small places has an effect. Whether its festivals or orchestras. It is good for the tourist industry to have events in these places, to attract more people.”