SCOTS are dour and mean? Scotland’s all tartan and shortbread? If you’re looking to rebuff such stereotypes, meet the three Scots tenors, Alan Beck, Ivan Sharpe and Jamie MacDougall — otherwise known as Caledon. Yes, they do wear kilts and, yes, they do sing traditional songs — but neither in quite the way you’d expect. The performances on their first solo CD, “The Power And The Passion”, deliver exactly what the title promises. Recorded with the City of Prague Philarmonic Orchestra, the Caradoc Chorus, Pipes and Drums and various Celtic instrumentalists, this isn’t just a big sound, it’s also a very lyrical sound, quietly tender one moment, joyful the next, with arrangements by the group’s musical director, Michael Barrett, that make you feel you’re hearing weel-kent songs for the very first time. In the “Mingulay Boat Song”, for example, Caledon’s seamen fairly scud over the choppy waters of the Minch while Bonnie Prince Charlie’s flight from Scotland in “Over The Sea To Skye” is a melancholy affair with only the occasional memory of battle to stir a broken spirit. More modern Scottish classics, such as Gavin Sutherland’s “Sailing” (made famous by Rod Stewart), also feature on this CD.

I met up with two of the group, Jamie and Alan, to share a pot of tea and find out why three classically trained opera singers had decided to perform together and why they had chosen to develop a predominantly Scottish repertoire. “We got together initially as a spoof of The Three Tenors,” Alan explains. “Fiona Kennedy (Callum Kennedy’s daughter) was putting on an all-day performance for Tartan TV at the 2001 Edinburgh Festival and was looking for acts. We went on at the end of the show and went down a storm. The President of the St Andrew’s Society of Detroit just happened to be there and invited us to perform for them. From that we received lots of bookings in North America so we knew we were on to something.”

This sounds all the more haphazard when you realise that the group had already known one another for almost 20 years. Alan and Jamie met while both were studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama and the pair met Ivan when they were studying for a postgraduate degree in London.

“Ivan’s actually from Helensburgh,” Alan explains, “but he became Head Chorister of Winchester Cathedral after winning a scholarship to study there and then he went on to London University.”

The depth of their friendship is illustrated by the close family as well as professional connections. Alan is married to Polly who is godmother to Jamie’s daughter, Ivan was Alan’s best man, Alan is godfather to Ivan’s son and Ivan is godfather to Alan’s!

Like all families, they enjoy a bit of banter at each other’s expense. The pair are keen to tell me, for example, that Ivan is the “aristocrat” of the group. “He’s a direct descendant of Robert the Bruce,” Jamie points out. “Twenty-three generations and, like any member of the Scottish Royal family, he has an English accent and lives outside Scotland!” Maybe they should have called themselves “Two Paupers and a King . . .”

...continued in Part 2

Esther Read

copyright 2007 The Scots Magazine