From 13-15 April Scottish Ensemble tour two movements from Martin Suckling’s Postcards to Edinburgh, Inverness and Aberdeen as part of their The Night Overtook Us programme with composer and fiddle player Donald Grant. The miniatures for string ensemble crystallise the composer’s style: radiating melodies that glow with microtones and shimmering textures that reveal a dark underworld.
They perform ‘Touch’ and ‘In Memoriam’ – the third and fourth parts of the 17-minute work. The former is a toccata of scurrying semiquavers in which the players join separately, and recombine in ever-changing groupings to create a many-voiced polyphony. This journey repeats, though with each iteration it is squeezed into smaller and smaller spaces, until eventually it is barely there at all. ‘In Memoriam’ recalls Suckling’s experience of “stepping out into what seemed to be the first day of Spring: barely a breeze, and the sunlight warm against my face”. A sequence of microtonal harmonies gradually transform into singing cello lines backed by fragments of dance and birdsong.
The pieces that make up Postcards were commissioned by Scottish Ensemble for their 2013-14 season, and toured Scotland as well as appearing at Wigmore Hall. Although the musical ideas underlying each piece might have the brevity of a message on a postcard, they develop into something much more substantive. “I like to think they might fit together a bit like Bach’s Notebooks for Anna Magdalena”, writes Suckling of the set, whose component parts can be presented individually or complete.