Kate Molleson
The Herald
September 2015

Katherine Bryan’s new album, Silver Bow, begins in a gentle lull: that lush, hazy thicket of strings, that bucolic, bygone Englishness setting the scene for Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. But across this particular idyll there is steely intent writ large. Out out of the muted strings comes the lark: flitting and spinning and soaring as usual, but it isn’t the lissom violin Vaughan Williams wrote for.

Bryan is principal flute of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, a post she has held since the age of 21. Anyone who has attended an RSNO concert in the intervening 12 years since her appointment will instantly recognise the bold, clear tone. Bryan is an unfussy, forthright player—the kind of generously expressive flautist who can one minute spin a soaring phrase over the top of a symphony orchestra and the next minute seduce with a hushed, voluptuous low range.

All of which makes her a compelling soloist as well as one of the RSNO’s prize principals—and that’s what Silver Bow is about. Her third solo release is a collection of violin showpieces that she has transcribed for flute. There is more soaring tunefulness where the Vaughan Williams came from: Massenet’s Meditation from Thais, the Romance from Shostakovich’s Gadfly Suite, Fritz Kreisler’s Liebsleid. Then there are the fireworks: Saint-Saens’s Introduction et rondo capriccioso; Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen, even the ultimate violin circus act that is Paganini’s Caprice No 24.

The Herald