Chisholm: Piano Concerto Piobaireachd – McLachlan

Sixty-some years is a long time for a concerto to sit in a drawer, and Erik Chisholm’s Piobaireachd Concerto — that’s the nickname it carries, from the Gaelic term for the classical music of the great highland bagpipe — spent most of them there, waiting for someone to care enough to dig out a set of orchestral parts that, as it turned out, didn’t even match the printed solo piano line. That somebody finally did care, and that the result is this live release from the Kelvin Ensemble under conditions that can only be called heroic, tells you something about the peculiar fate of Scottish music in the twentieth century. Chisholm wrote ten operas. Two symphonies. Five ballets. Four piano concertos. Almost none of it got heard, then or since. This disc is a start at redressing that, and a pretty thrilling one.

The concerto dates originally from 1930, revised by 1937, premiered in 1933, broadcast once more in 1938 — and then: silence, until a rendition in Glasgow around 2000 and this NAYO Festival account from August 2001, which is what we actually hear on the disc. Student players, mostly, the Kelvin Ensemble being drawn from youth orchestra ranks, and you can hear it here and there — a smear of intonation in the brass, a slight tentativeness in ensemble at a couple of the scherzo’s trickier corners. None of that matters much. What matters is the paradoxical fact that Chisholm managed to write music soaked in bagpipe idiom — the drone, the “urlar” theme with its characteristic wide upward leap, the microtonally sharpened C and F that give pibroch its uncanny tang — without producing anything remotely like tartan kitsch. This is not Mendelssohn’s Scotland, all mist and postcard. It’s tougher, more astringent, closer in spirit to what Bartók was doing with Hungarian and Romanian folk material in the same years. McLachlan’s own useful coinage for the composer — “MacBartók” — earns its keep here.

The first movement unfolds at unhurried length, laying out its urlar and then working through variations that eventually build to the “creanluidh,” pibroch’s culminating flourish — a toccata-driven Scots dance emerges at one point, and later a slow, luxuriant episode that put me in mind, oddly but persuasively, of the “Bluebird” episode from Busoni’s Indian Diary. That’s not a comparison I’d have expected to make about a Scottish concerto from 1930, but there it is; Chisholm’s harmonic imagination ranges further than his subject matter might suggest. The scherzo that follows has real bite — trumpet calls echoing the rhythms of puirt a beul, “mouth music,” Gaelic vocal dance tunes, laced with a jazzy syncopation that curdles into something stranger before a sudden, almost impudent flourish ends it. The slow movement is the emotional core: a stroke of gong, tremolo strings suggesting mist rolling off a hillside, and the piano tracing a pibroch-like line that McLachlan plays with real sensitivity to its stillness — pebbles dropping into dark water, one critic called it, and that’s about right. A Baxian trumpet solo penetrates the texture and the music grows in intensity without ever losing its nocturnal remoteness. The finale snaps back into reel and strathspey rhythms, puirt a beul again but rowdier now, almost ribald — a deliberate foil to what came before.

McLachlan plays as though he has lived inside this score for years, which by all accounts he has; his advocacy for Chisholm goes back to an earlier Olympia disc of the solo piano music, and it shows in the conviction of every phrase here. He doesn’t smooth over the concerto’s oddities — the nine-note scale limitations Chisholm imported from pipe music, the deliberately constricted melodic range — he leans into them.

The solo pieces that fill out the disc are, frankly, a mixed bag, but an interesting one. The Sonatina in G minor, composed when Chisholm was barely out of his teens, runs nearly eighteen minutes and shows a young composer still finding his feet — rhapsodic, occasionally diffuse, with a slow movement that drifts close to Billy Mayerl-ish salon sparkle before an athletic rondo pulls things back together. The Fourth Sonatina is a different animal entirely: compact, two movements, built from old Spanish lute music with an elegant, seasoned economy that makes we wish he’d written more like it. Star Point — the title apparently a nod to Chisholm’s interest in astronomy — has a quasi-French glow to it, something of John Ireland’s harmonic fingerprint. The Four Elegies are terse, bruised things, Bartókian in their clangorous dissonance, with bagpipe skirl audible under the surface. And “With Cloggs On” — the sole surviving movement of a projected Cornish Suite — is a barnstormer: wild, defiant, virtuosic in the Busoni-Balakirev tradition, the kind of piece that would sit happily next to Islamey on a recital program without embarrassment.

Is this all first-rate music? No — the early sonatina especially betrays its student origins, and not every experiment pays off. But the concerto is the real discovery, a genuinely individual voice working at the collision point of highland folk tradition and interwar modernism, closer in spirit to Bartók, Szymanowski, even Karol