Kenneth Roy
The students missed
their chance to bring down
the crumbling house
Bob Smith
Charles Kennedy
Walter Humes
How can you
tell when politicians
are lying?
The Cafe
Bill Heaney
Jill Stephenson
The spectre of shortage
that shaped my
post-war life
The Cafe
Alex Cox
Alan Fisher
Yemen and
America’s fear
of the franchise
Rear Window
Hydropathic holidays
Andrew Hook
In Barcelona, I was struck
by two presences and
one absence
The Last Word
John Brown
30.03.11
No. 385
30.03.11No. 385
Music
The Edinburgh Bach Choir is celebrating 100 years of making music. This voluntary choir, where the members pay £100 a year to belong, has been bringing great music to the people of Edinburgh and occasionally beyond. It has sung all the great composers but come back time and again to the man many consider the greatest of all, J S Bach.
Its concert last Saturday evening in the colourful setting of St Cuthbert’s Church in Edinburgh showed the choir at its best. The work chosen was Bach’s ‘St Matthew Passion’, which shocked the congregation of Bach’s time because of its almost operatic form.
Indeed, the dramatic portrayal of the Evangalist by Joshua Ellicot would not have been out of place on the operatic stage. He was one of a fine array of singers assembled by Neil Mantle, the excellent conductor of the Bach Choir, although the men seemed stronger than the women partly because Bach gave them the best roles and tunes.
Stewart Kempster as Christ towered over us physically from the altar and dominated us vocally with his splendid bass. Chris Elliot, a young tenor, also impressed and Phillipa Hyde was the best of the women.
The chorus, divided into two choirs as Bach specified, were in splendid form. All credit to Neil Mantle – the work flowed smoothly all night which was amazing considering there had only been one full rehearsal with soloists and orchestra the morning before the performance.
Speaking to the experienced Stewart Kempster afterwards, he confirmed my judgement that this was one of the finest performances of the ‘St Matthew Passion’ that he had ever sung in. At the end, as Neil Mantle took the warm applause of the audience, he held up the score by Bach making it clear who was the star of the evening.
Hugh Kerr
SR accepts no advertising or corporate backing. We depend entirely on the generosity of our individual supporters. Help SR to flourish by becoming a Friend. [click here]
Go out on a Saturday
night? You must
be joking
Barbara Millar
If you haven’t been glued to BBC4 between 9 and 11pm on Saturday nights for the past 10 weeks, then look away now. This column is not for you.
This column is for the SR readers who are among the half million or so devotees of ‘The Killing’, the superb Danish crime thriller which has blessedly dominated our lives and our viewing schedule for over two months.
Go out on a Saturday night? You must be joking. Not when I could watch the gritty, determined, single-minded deputy police superintendent Sarah Lund pore over the plot’s latest twists and turns in the bid to discover who murdered the young Nanna Birk Larsen: the sinister machinations at City Hall; the constant obstructions by her boss; the growing empathy between her and police colleague Jan Meyer (and who wasn’t shocked when he was gunned down in episode 18?); the bitter rifts between her and her mother, son and boyfriend.
The series has even provoked an unprecedented rush for the rugged jumper worn in virtually every episode by Ms Lund, created by hand-knitters Gudrun and Gudrun in the Faroe Islands (and, with stocks replenished, back on sale – a snip at £245!)
And now it is all over. On Saturday, the denouement. The final two episodes which revealed the killer and put an end to all those anguished, passionate, who-done-it conversations with family and friends. It’s top cop Lennart Brix – he’s odious, and he was at the hospital when Jan Meyer suddenly died, despite seemingly on the road to recovery. It’s mayoral wannabe Troels Hartmann – he may still be affected by the death of his wife (although he does have Rie, a sexy new girlfriend), but the flat in which the murder took place belonged to his Liberal Party. It’s Troels’ right-hand man and campaign manager Morten Weber – he’s always looked a bit shifty and he had access to the flat, it’s grieving father Theis Birk Larsen – perhaps he wasn’t her real father and they’re not real tears.It’s Poul Bremer – there must be lots of skeletons in his mayoral closet.
Is that a strong enough motive for her murder? Unfortunately, after
being gripped by the story for weeks, I’m not sure I could buy it.
Each week a new potential suspect with a believable motive, each week a new line of inquiry, each week on the edge of my seat, watching the drama unfold in Copenhagen’s grainy, damp November half-light: focussing on the sub-titles, yet somehow feeling I am absorbing and understanding every word of the clipped, guttural Danish tongue.
The writing has been formidable – Soren Sveistrup (who has claimed his early inspiration came from Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories) has created totally authentic characters and a heartbreaking series of actions and events. The acting has similarly been memorable. Eat your heart out DCI Jackie Reid and the rest of the Taggart team.
On the eve of the final episode some of us had a ‘Forbrydelsen’ (‘The Killing’ in Danish) lunch, complete with Danish pastries, Danish blue cheese, Lurpak (I checked, still produced in Denmark), rollmop herrings and Gravadlax (appreciate that’s Swedish but there isn’t a Danish equivalent of Ikea at Braehead just yet), marking the compelling significance of the programme in our lives, and depositing a fiver and our individual suspect’s name into an envelope, to see whether we really had any idea at all who was the perpetrator. (If none of us was proved right the money was earmarked for Cats Protection, by popular vote).
And now, as I finish this piece late on Saturday evening, we know the name of the murderer – seemingly benign ‘Uncle’ Vagn, the long-term family friend, the trusted employee of the Birk Larsens, who’d watched their daughter grow up and had murdered her, so he claimed, to prevent her running away with a young man of whom he believed the family would disapprove. Is that a strong enough motive for her murder? Unfortunately, after being gripped by the story for weeks, I’m not sure I could buy it.
And Sveistrup got carried away further still – with Vagn luring Theis Birk Larsen, his close friend of over 20 years, into the woods to reveal that he murdered Nanna and then goading Theis into killing him, with his wife, Sarah Lund and a phalanx of police personnel standing close by, impotent.
Bremer had a convenient stroke, ruling him out of the mayoral race; a tearful Rie was sacked; Bengt, Sarah’s boyfriend, got her out of custody with a forged psychiatric report. There were simply too many loose ends needing to be tied up in the last episode and, for once, the events were rushed, the writing patchy in its hasty bid to draw a line under each character’s contribution to the story.
Even the acting lost some of its punch, Sarah often seeming detached, peripheral. I began to want to see some crack in her professional froideur, and came to the conclusion her character worked better in tandem with her difficult side-kick Meyer.
But one jarring episode does not wreck the series and there will be a second offering of ‘Nordic noir’ starting in the autumn. I shall be watching. By the way, the cat charity got the money.
Barbara Millar is a freelance journalist, tour guide and charity trustee
- Friends of SR
- We need your help to maintain our inquiring journalism.
- To become a Friend of SR, click here
- Scottish Review
- 66 John Finnie Street
- Kilmarnock KA1 1BS
- Tel: 01563 530830
- email: admin@scottishreview.net
- web: www.scottishreview.net
Related Articles
The Scottish Festival Calendar: What Not to Miss in 2026
7 Mar 2026Aberdeen Jazz Festival Celebrates 10 Days of Music
6 Mar 2026Scottish Entertainment: Film, TV, and Beyond
6 Mar 2026Country to Country Festival Brings Nashville to Glasgow
5 Mar 2026Glasgow Film Festival Celebrates Scottish Cinema with World Premieres
5 Mar 2026Glasgow International Comedy Festival Returns for 2026
5 Mar 2026
