The Scottish musical rococo is a rare commodity and yet James Oswald, a local musician’s son from the fishing village of Crail on the east coast just below St Andrew’s, reveals just how fashionable courtly elegance can be when tenderly infused by the unmistakable reeling of Scottish vernacular melody. Oswald was active in the mid-eighteenth century and found his greatest success in London, where he worked as a chamber composer for George III and ran a music shop next to St Martin-in-the-Fields. Indeed, it is not hard to see how he came to be a popular figure, with his easy, measured lyricism articulated by a natural, if not spectacular melodic gift.
Catherine Bott lends the vocal numbers a poignancy, but resists the temptation to make more of the music than is there; in Colin’s Kisses, a set of drawing-room cameos presented as three tableaux between selected instrumental pieces, Bott is charm personified, and she controls textual innuendo with the selected restraint and propriety of a Miss Brodie. That said, there is something of a Brigadoon-like swooning quality in ‘The Stolen Kiss’ which is affectingly realized. Her partner, Iain Paton is a mixed success. His soft-grained tenor suits the gentle strophic style and he characterizes the text well but his intonation and control let him down too often.
Oswald was an insatiable collector of Scottish traditional music and the examples presented by the splendid Concerto Caledonia deserve to be better known, as does the accomplished Italianate Serenata No. 4. An attractive yearning tenderness is constantly projected and the voicing, as in the expressive ‘Ettrick Banks’, brings alive the intrinsic grace of these timeless melodies. The Airs for the Four Seasons are especially notable. I hummed the Pastorale from ‘The Thistle’ for a week. This pleasurable experience followed a day of listening to Robert Carver, that fine north-of-the-border polyphonist, and a revisiting of Hyperion’s enterprising disc (also from Concerto Caledonia with Catherine Bott, 8/98) of cantatas by John Clerk of Penicuik. As he would say, ‘O renovata Scotia’!'