The Scottish Ensemble's 'Bach & Blood' programme was built around a historical wound: on 7 July 1720, JS Bach returned from Carlsbad to find his wife Maria Barbara already buried. She was 35. The collection of Sonatas and Partitas he completed shortly after begins with the inscription 'Sei solo' — either a misspelling of 'six solos' or, as the music suggests, a deliberate declaration of aloneness. The monumental D minor Chaconne, with its weeping chromatic theme, argues strongly for the latter reading. Helga Thoene's arrangement of the Chaconne extrapolates ghostly hymn fragments from within the piece itself, surrounding Jonathan Morton's solo violin with nine voices from the Chamber Choir of the National Youth Choir of Scotland. Morton played with disarming directness — no interpretive vanity, just the music's grief made audible. The choir, directed by Christopher Bell, was a delicate and distant presence, partly by design and partly because of a balance problem among parts that left them slightly stranded. The effect was uncanny even so: the violin not quite alone, not quite accompanied. Arvo Pärt's Greater Antiphons — his own arrangement of the Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen for string orchestra — served as the programme's navigational hinge. With no counterpoint, all weight falls on texture and gesture, and the Scottish Ensemble treated every relationship between bow and string as a distinct vocabulary: percussive, bell-like, husky, half-breathed. These are tiny prayers, and the ensemble played them as such — not reverentially, but with precise attention to what each gesture was actually doing. David Fennessy's Blood (2024) arrived last, and the sequencing was deliberate. Pärt was the dock; Fennessy was the open sea. This not-concerto for solo violin, strings, and voices takes a Hildegard of Bingen chant — 'O ruby blood' — as its starting point across seven movements. Morton refused to soften what Fennessy calls 'hard-earned virtuosity', sending out pulses of musical electricity that sparked through the ensemble. The prickly complexity never became merely difficult — the work shares, improbably, Pärt's drive toward a single unison pitch, a quest the closing smudgy echoes of violin and voices tantalisingly approach without quite reaching. What the Scottish Ensemble does unusually well is programme as argument. This wasn't three pieces that happened to share a bill; it was a case built over ninety minutes about solitude, grief, the body, and the long shadow of early music on the contemporary. The Fennessy gains enormously from arriving after Bach and Pärt — the ear is tuned for it, primed to hear the unison it keeps almost finding. That's a curatorial intelligence that most orchestras, however talented, don't bother to deploy.
