Bach & Blood: a choral version of Bach's Chaconne, Pärt's Magnificat Antiphons for strings, & David Fenessy meditating on Hildegard & blood

David Fenessy: Blood - Jonathan Morton, Scottish Ensemble, Chamber Choir of NYCOS, Christopher Bell (Photo: Ed Maitland-Smith)

Bach & Blood: Bach,  Arvo Pärt, David Fenessy; Jonathan Morton, Scottish Ensemble, Chamber Choir of the National Youth Choir of Scotland, Christopher Bell; Milton Court Concert Hall
Reviewed 2 October 2026

A fascinating and thought-provoking programme that pairs David Fenessy's remarkable piece for solo violin, choir and strings, with Bach's Chaconne complete with its originating chorales and Pärt's string version of his magnificat antiphons 

The Scottish Ensemble's Bach & Blood programme brought together music by Bach, Arvo Pärt and Glasgow-based Irish composer David Fenessy on a short tour of Scotland and England which ended on Friday 2 October 2026 at the Barbican Centre's Milton Court Concert Hall. The Scottish Ensemble under its artistic director, violinist Jonathan Morton were joined by the Chamber Choir of the National Youth Choir of Scotland (NYCOS) and conductor Christopher Bell, the Choir's artistic director in a programme which moved from Bach's Chaconne from Partita No. 2 in D minor for solo violin in Helga Thoene's version with accompanying chorales, Arvo Pärt's Greater Antiphons for string orchestra, and David Fenessy's Blood for solo violin, string orchestra and choir.

Professor Helga Thoene suggests that Bach's Partita No. 2, and especially its last movement, was a tombeau written in memory of Bach's first wife, Maria Barbara Bach (who died in 1720). The suggestion is not uncontroversial, but Thoene has created a version of the Chaconne which puts the violin line with the chorales on which Thoene suggests the music is based. And it is these chorales that suggested the tombeau idea.

To explicitly include the sung chorals alongside the violinit represents a type of performance which Bach would never have considered, partly because during Bach's day the chorale melodies would have been so well known that an alert listener would probably have detected them. Yet it remains a fascinating excercise, bringing out that which is hidden. Jonathan Morton performed with eight singers from Chamber Choir of the National Youth Choir of Scotland (sopranos, altos and one tenor, I think). Morton's somewhat strenuous performance at the work's opening contrasted with aetherial, transparent sound of the singers. 

There was no question of Morton's superb dexterity, but I wondered whether some of his speeds were a little too fleet, and when we got to the sober chorale-like moment in the violin (one vastly appreciated by Busoni), I wanted more body in his tone, as I felt that too often he liked to pull away from the tone too much.

There was something curiously abstract about the combination of vivid violin line with disembodied voices. The singers emphasised quality of sound, rather than diction, and without printed words we were unable to ascertain the chorales' links to death and memorial. 

Arvo Pärt composed his Sieben Magnificat-Antiphonen or Seven Magnificat-Antiphons in 1998, setting the text of the magnificat antiphons known as the O Anthems. In 2008 he created a version for cello octet under the title O Antiphons, for Cello8ctet Amsterdam [see my review of their disc], then in 2015 he reworked it again for string orchestra as Greater Antiphons for Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was this string orchestra version that the Scottish Ensemble played, directed from the violin by Jonathan Morton.

The string sound was warm and flexibly, creating something less austere and magisterial than the choir version. This was a performance that viewed the music as string music, accepting that the act of transcribing the work for choir changed it. O Adonai was thoughtful, with a bass line that was warm and fleixible, whilst the use of pizzicato in O Root of Jesse created contrasts in texture, then O Key of David was intense. The result, for a singer who knows the choral versions, was very striking, very effective and very different! In O Morning Star the use of vibrato combined with transparent tone to create something haunting and evocative, thne King of All People was very mobile with the melody flowing easily between the different parts. We ended with O Emmanuel which moved from light and dance-like to a strong and powerful climax.

David Fenessy's Blood was written for Irish Chamber Orchestra, Katherine Hunka (violin), and Thomas Zehetmair, (conductor) and premiered in Dublin in 2024. Fenessy had a very specific view of the work from the outset, commenting "For some years, I knew that if I ever got the opportunity to write a concertante work for violin, the solo instrument would have to be complemented by voices in the orchestra, and also, it would have to be called Blood."

Fenessy says that the work is based on a short melody by Hildegard of Bingen, slowed down so much as to be unrecognisable. The consonats are erased and replaced with eerie noises and vowels, creating pure sound. The work is in seven sections, each based around a section of Hildegard's melody, O rubor sanguinis. Without any words to follow, and because each section flowed on from the next, the work came over as one long single arc with occasional pause points.

The work began with a smooth ooh from the singers and angry string scrubbbing. This developed into something more dynamic, but there was a sense that the string writing was more about timbre and texture than pitch. Morton's solo line was full of vivid, unpitched detail and Morton really threw himself into it so that for the vigorous passages his whole body seemed to vibrate. There were passages where the choir replaced pitch with breath, but largely they were pitched and the strings moved towards and away from them, sometimes pitch was important often it wasn't.

There were sections where the piece seemed to be deliberately falling apart, as if the solo was unable to sustain things for long. There was much detailed writing for both the solo and the string orchestra with some (or all) passages written with individual string lines. At time eerie and haunting, at times vivid there was something visceral about the way Morton and the strings relished Fenessy's use of texture. 

Lacking the ability to detect the outlines of Hildegard's vastly slowed down melody, the ending of the work seemed to lack structure. Ii felt as if Fenessy was circling round the same tropes repeatedly as the music died and was reborn. Until the rather magical ending when after a hard-won harmonic unison from strings and choir, the aetherial music led to just choir and solo violin leading to nothing.

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