Nordic Music Days Opening Concert: Scottish Ensemble, Aidan O'Rourke, and Qullaq

Nordic Music Days Opening Concert: Scottish Ensemble, Aidan O'Rourke, and Qullaq

Scottish Ensemble are a pioneering collective of musicians who champion music for strings, collaborate with creative minds and blur the boundaries between genres and artforms. For this performance they are joined by musicians from Norway, Finland, and Greenland, as well as one of Scotland’s most well-known musicians, Aidan O’Rourke.

Qullaq is a groundbreaking collaboration between musicians from Scotland and Greenland. Ancient and contemporary Greenlandic drum dances typically involve a lot of descending vocal and physical gestures. Qullaq means ‘ascending’: this work is a confrontational but jubilant exploration of a long-persecuted culture which is now in the ascendence. Drawing on myths, social dynamics and post-colonial politics, the piece brings together contemporary Inuit performance practices from Kalaallit nunaat (Greenland) with Aidan O’Rourke’s unique take on Scottish traditional music and the strings of the Scottish Ensemble.  

Easter 2024 saw O’Rourke travelling to Sisimiut in Western Greenland where he met with actors/musicians/polymaths Hans-Hernik Suersaq Poulsen, Miké Fencer Thomsen and Arnannguaq Gerstrøm. In late summer they gathered again at the cutting-edge Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium in Denmark, now bringing in actor/musician Nive Nielsen. The result of their time together is a proud, challenging and playful sharing of ancient cultures and the new: an inquiry into what it means to be a tradition-bearer in today’s world.

Jukka Tiensuu’s Innuo opens the programme, taking a baroque orchestra as a starting point and ending up somewhere completely new in a masterclass of orchestration. Seyoung Oh’s The platform vividly echoes is inspired by the story of one of Glasgow’s ‘lost’ stations - the Botanic Gardens Railway Station, weaving archive sound through the music.

Works by Anna Thordvaldsdóttir and David Fennessy complete the programme, with both exploring spacious landscapes and flowing sound worlds.

This concert is part of the Nordic Music Days festival. The full programme can be found at nordicmusicdays.org

Programme

• Jukka Tiensuu (Finland): Innuo 9’

• Seyoung Oh (Scotland): The platform vividly echoes 9’  first performance

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• Anna Thorvaldsdottir (Iceland): Reflections 10’

• David Fennessy (Scotland): An open field (come closer, come closer) 6’

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• Aidan O’Rourke (Scotland), Nive Nielsen, Hans-Henrik Suersaq Poulsen, and Miké Fencer Thomsen (Greenland): Qullaq 25’ first performance

Scottish Ensemble

• Jonathan Morton (director, violin) 

• Tristan Gurney (violin) 

• Jane Atkins (viola) 

• Alison Lawrence (cello) 

• Diane Clark (double bass) 

with 

• Aidan O’Rourke (fiddle) 

• Nive Nielsen (voice) 

• Hans-Henrik Suersaq Poulsen (voice/drum) 

• Miké Fencer Thomsen (voice/guitar) 

• Maiken Mathisen Schau & Hanna Kinnunen (flute) 

• Amy Turner (oboe) 

• Nina Ashton (bassoon) 

Qullaq: directional and dramaturgical consultation from Valerio Peroni, Alice Occhiali and Francesca Tesoniero at Nordisk Teaterlaboratorium.

Tickets (£20/£6) 

Unreserved seating and standing space

1 hour 30 minutes

Supported by: The Danish Composers Society, Nordic Theatre Laboratory, the Danish Arts Foundation and the Augustinus Foundation