The cellist Louise McMonagle’s solo concert was part of Kings Place’s year-long ‘Scotland Unwrapped’ season. While the cellist herself is Scottish and some of her repertoire was from Scotland, the concert also ranged well beyond the boundaries of a single nation. McMonagle is the cellist of the Riot Ensemble, which is conducted by Aaron Holloway-Nahum, and for the second half of this concert he handled the electronics.
The first half, which McMonagle played from memory, illustrated the ‘ancient modernity’ theme through a dialogue between old and new, where traditional melodies were combined with a broadly contemporary musical language. After the interval, the acoustic cello was confronted with the state-of-the-art surround-sound system in Kings Place Hall 2, offering a different slant on the theme.
Another theme underpinning several pieces was the COVID-19 lockdown, which prompted a flood of works for unaccompanied instruments to be played by isolated performers. Lisa Robertson’s The Light Through the Trees (2020) was inspired by walks through the woods of the Scottish Highlands during lockdown: it sounded like a song that’s been exploded across registers, exploiting the cello’s many different sonorities. The composer and harpist Ailie Robertson’s Skydance was commissioned during the pandemic for Riot Ensemble’s ‘Zeitgeist’ series of solo pieces. Like Robertson’s piece, it was inspired by nature – in this case, a hen harrier in flight – and McMonagle brought out its beautiful expressive harmonics.
Zoe Martlew’s short 2011 work, Salat Babilya (Babylonian Prayer), inspired by Iraqi music and especially by the oud, is a short piece for solo cello without bow, and as a cellist herself, Martlew knows how to evoke the sonority of the Middle Eastern lute. Martlew says the original oud piece on which it is based was ‘written to help lull the children of Baghdad to sleep during bombing raids’. Of course, it has contemporary relevance in these troubled times: the place might change, the bombs sadly keep falling.
We returned to Scotland for the oldest piece on the programme, Callanish IV (1978) by John Maxwell Geddes (1941–2017). It was inspired by a stone circle in the Outer Hebrides and draws on the Gaelic psalm tune ‘Stornoway’; the tune occasionally comes into focus, surrounded by fragmentary shards. McMonagle played in a Glasgow youth orchestra under Geddes’ direction and was inspired by his musicianship and eccentric personality. Including his short work was a touching tribute to a mentor.
Corrina Hewat’s My Love Dodging Rizla (2008) was, according to the composer, ‘written after an extremely hairy drive on the Isle of Skye, heading down the single-track road to Sabhal Mor Ostaig in the middle of the night’. Originally composed for her instrument, the harp, this piece was the most conventionally folky of all the works on the programme. It contrasted with the previous pieces with its welcome focus on the bass register rather than ethereal harmonics; McMonagle built up considerable momentum, and there was plenty of chair dancing in the room.
The final work in the first half moved us to the other side of the world, to a work by the Australian Liza Lim that featured McMonagle standing up to play the cello with two bows. Cello Playing – As Meteorology (2021) was, in Lim’s words, ‘a meeting between two similarly sized bodies, each with appendages or prostheses for touching, stroking and reaching towards the other’. The 11-minute-long piece showcased a sound that is sometimes grounded and sometimes awakens strange harmonics and slippery glissandi, and more than any other piece on the programme it created striking stage images, as McMonagle’s bows circled around the fingerboard.
Aaron Holloway-Nahum joined McMonagle for the surround-sound electronic element of the second half. Alex Groves’ Curved Form (No. 11) is another piece that was recorded by McMonagle at home during the COVID-19 lockdown. Like Lim’s piece, its sound is continuous and sustained, though its ebbing and flowing had far less edge than Lim’s work. Purple light projections, like a slowly swirling maze, suited the meditative character of this piece.
One work I want to hear again is Tonia Ko’s Concertino for Scavengers, which was given its world premiere in this concert. Ko wanted to celebrate ‘the little sounds that happen on a string instrument’: these knocking and brushing sonorities were projected in surround sound and sometimes seemed, unnervingly, to come from nowhere. McMonagle’s disembodied dialogue with herself was intriguing, as was the work’s structure, which came across like a mosaic of different coloured shards.
Holloway-Nahum was also represented as a composer, with the second world premiere of the evening, his Will I Ever Be Able to Sing? Asking string players to talk or sing while playing is becoming a new music cliché, and this piece started with a dialogue between live and recorded voice. However, it quickly moved well beyond received ideas and moved in completely unexpected directions. My main memory of this piece is that it was LOUD, driven and aggressive: something urgent was being communicated, but it was unclear what.
The concert ended back on Scottish territory with a piece by Anna Meredith. Her moonmoons (2019), a short piece from her second album FIBS, references the ‘moons of moons’, worlds within worlds and layers upon layers, where the acoustic and electronic worlds are sometimes in harmony and sometimes collide. A sustained cello line is initially accompanied by playful rising and falling synth lines that start off regular, but become less predictable as they build up momentum. We were lulled into a false sense of security at the beginning, then a rumbling bass introduced something much more disturbing that literally vibrated the floor of the hall. With sonorities that occasionally resembled a vintage video game, this was a punchy close to the programme.
This epic journey from Scotland to the rest of the world and back again was a superb showcase for McMonagle’s virtuosity and communicative skill. She compellingly projected the highly contrasting musical languages and emotional moods of each work: the concert made me look forward to her album, also to be titled Ancient Modernity. It was also salutary to remember that several pieces were premiered online by McMonagle during the COVID-19 pandemic, and above all it was a real pleasure to experience the programme as a live event.
