London, Wigmore Hall: Erik Chisholm and Ronald Stevenson

Extract

Murray McLachlan's première of Erik Chisholm's Sonata in A minor on 4 January marked the centenary of Chisholm's birth (in Cathcart, outside Glasgow) to the day itself. Chisholm was a considerable force for good while he was busy in Scotland: the first British performances of Les Troyens, Béatrice et Bénédicte and Idomeneo; visits to his ‘Active Society for the Propagation of Contemporary Music’ in Glasgow from Bartók, Casella, Schmitt, Sorabji (a close friend), Szymanowski and other luminaries. But he could, apparently, be a difficult man, and with his posting to Singapore by ENSA in 1943, to conduct the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and subsequent nomination to the chair of the music department of the University of Cape Town in 1946, his native land seems to have been content to forget the outsized personality whom Arnold Bax called ‘the most progressive composer that Scotland has produced’.