an accessible and varied evening of violin led classical music
It’s something of a paradox that bringing classical music into a church seems to lower the formality of both. The music comes down off the stage and among its audience, while the church feels fuller for the sound to gather and reverberate. Scottish Ensemble’s Bach & Blood becomes an informal and absorbing tour through what classical music can do.
At St John’s Kirk, a bulky presence in the centre of Perth whose exterior scarcely contains the splendour within, this concert brings together the Scottish Ensemble, singers from the Chamber Choir of the National Youth Choir of Scotland (NYCOS), solo violinist Jonathan Morton and conductor Christopher Bell. Its programme moves from Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 in D minor, with accompanying chorales, through Arvo Pärt’s Greater Antiphons, to the UK premiere of Glasgow composer David Fennessy’s Blood. The music echoes throughout the kirk, adding to its ephemeral, atmospheric quality.
Bach’s Chaconne begins the evening with the composition’s solo violin accompanied by choir. Morton’s solo violin builds and drops in intensity, while the choir heightens the emotional charge around it. The voices and violin dovetail, each seeming to push the other further: the violin seems to push the chorales, and they return in kind. It is a beautiful combination, with the architecture amplifying the work’s sense of scale. The result is not merely music placed inside a church, but music resonating with the church’s surrounding structure.
The choir are wonderful addition, adding to the drama of the piece without distracting from this being a solo work.
Pärt’s Greater Antiphons, performed with the Scottish Ensemble, offers a brief but varied introduction to the possibilities of modern classical music. Across its seven parts, the work shifts between jaunty movement to stillness, between rhythmic activity and calm. The strings move in murmurations, binding the physical movement to the emotions of the piece.
The evening finishes with Fennessy’s Blood, which is a much more anxious and fidgety experience. The work has been developed from a melody by 12th-century poet Hildegard von Bingen and combines all elements of the evening so far – voice, solo violin and string arrangement. It is an unsettling contemporary composition. All plucks and skittish movements. Harmonies seem to emerge from an agitated fugue. The choral arrangement that added ephemeral lifts in the previous works instead provides rasps and hisses that echo around the vaults to create an unsettling atmosphere. The piece ends without an obvious crescendo, instead it seems to settle, with the charge created slowly dissipating around the kirk.
This is a wonderful evening: informal, and atmospheric and explores a range of classical styles whilst also feeling whole. Combined with the architecture, it shows how classical music can inhabit a space and both enhance and unsettle it.
The Scottish Ensemble has completed a short autumn tour in Scotland that has taken in Whitekirk St Mary’s Church, Perth St John’s Kirk and Glasgow Cathedral with a final performance at London’s Milton Court in October: https://scottishensemble.co.uk/programme/2026-27/bach-blood/