‘Wha’s like us?’ asks Matthew Rooke’s Flyting

Sep 9 2011 by Alison Anderson, Perthshire Advertiser Friday

FOR one night only, a remarkable music project which crosses and blends five centuries, countries and cultures, musical forms and modern media will be performed in Perth Concert Hall.

Even the name of this tour de force by composer Matthew Rooke carries an air of intrigue: ‘Flyting’ takes its name from an exuberant form of renaissance Scottish poetry and it is in Renaissance Scotland of the late 15th/early 16th centuries in which Matthew’s incredible Flyting journey starts.

And at the head of this starting point is James IV, a truly Renaissance ruler whose successful reign was cut short on Flodden Field on September 9, 1513 – tragically notching up the statistic as the last monarch from Great Britain to be killed in battle.

Matthew, who was born in England to Scottish and Gabonese parents, was intrigued to discover that at the heart of James IV’s court was African culture, including African musicians and two African ladies of high standing.

James IV was also an avid patron of the arts, including through the Scots makars, whose diverse and socially observant works conveyed a vibrant and memorable picture of cultural life and intellectual concerns in the period.

“It made me wonder what Scotland was like in James IV’s time. It was the last time Scotland was truly independent with a renaissance king, but that world died at Flodden and now we do not hear about that time in history,” said Matthew.

With this as his base for Flyting, Matthew has put new flesh on the bones of the past five centuries of history, including Perth’s own astonishing role in ending slavery.

Blending classical strings, jazz-influenced brass and traditional pipes and drums, plus well-known voices from opera and traditional music, Flyting asks the question ‘wha’s like us?’.

Matthew’s work opens with a reading from Perth Kirk Session in 1567 about the sin of flyting. It then moves to the 17th century where the spotlight is on Scottish explorer Mungo Park, who in his quest to find the source of the Niger River discovered that the further inland he travelled in Africa the more civilised he found the culture. He expanded that discovery by finding out about different cultures and the linkage between them.

Moving on to the 18th century, the setting is Robert Burns’ The Slave’s Lament and the focus is on Perth, where in effect slavery in the UK was brought to an end. It was in the Fair City where the Earl of Mansfield, as Lord Chancellor, declared in the Joseph Knight case that Knight could not be a slave because in Scotland is was not possible for a person to be owned by another person.

Perth’s much-loved international opera baritone Donald Maxwell takes the role of Alexander Gillon MacAlpine, who was born in 1869 and became a popular and successful Scottish missionary in Africa. He was particularly interested in the languages and cultures, and this is reflected in Matthew’s composition blending African dance rituals, Catholic Mass and Arabic call to prayer.

Flyting will bring its audience into the 20th and 21st centuries with a piece on role reversals, inspired both by Perth’s William Soutar and his poem The Waterfall, and by a group of black missionaries who set up a support centre in Glasgow for Scots with drug and other social problems.

Matthew hopes his musical kaleidoscope will strike a chord with all music lovers: “Most people find contemporary classical music a penance to bear, but with Flyting I want people to engage with these stories.

“The music is very, very lyrical; it’s thunderous and sometimes ravishing, and I hope at all times accessible. It’s also adventurous, and I hope Perth people will come with me on this adventure.”

Matthew’s adventure comes via a stellar ensemble in which our own Donald Maxwell is joined by, among others, the voices of soprano Gweneth Ann Jeffers, Corinna Hewat and Perth’s own Horsecross Voices, piper and saxophonist Fraser Fifield, classical and jazz guitarist Haftor Medboe, percussion ace Oliver Cox, the RSNO string orchesta and the drums of the Vale of Atholl Pipe Band.

Tickets for Flyting in Perth Concert Hall at 7.30pm next Saturday cost just £10.50 (concessions £6.50), from the box office, telephone 01738 621031 and online atwww.horsecross.co.uk