Interview: Jonathan Morton, artistic director of the Scottish Ensemble

He is, in fact, just one of several key figures in Glasgow’s musical life, Donald Runnicles among them, who have been given their own “weekends” to play with by Svend Brown, director of Glasgow Life.

But for this weekend the focus is on Morton, who gets carte blanche to flood his chosen venues with music that sets his soul on fire. True to form, the music and performers he has signed up are not so much off the wall, though some are approaching it, as typically fresh and eclectic in the sense that they transcend the ordinary and cross stylistic borders with ease.

Performances range from an opening Minimalist concert late on Friday at the Old Fruitmarket – which features Morton with his own Scottish Ensemble and the feisty contemporary combo Icebreaker playing music by Steve Reich, Philip Glass and Louis Andriessen – through Saturday night’s eccentric cocktail of Romanian ethno-group Taraf da Haidouks, the heavenly Hilliard Ensemble and the spontaneously unpredictable Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, to a Sunday night finale in Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum featuring the joint forces of the Medici, Cavaleri, Gildas and Fifth Quadrant Quartets in holy minimalist John Tavener’s theatrical spatial spectacular Towards Silence for four string quartets.

And they include, in equal measure, both the extraordinary – a performance on Sunday of Morimur, in which Kuusisto plays Bach’s D minor Partita superimposed by snatches of Bach chorales sung by the Hilliard Ensemble – and the innovative –a new piece in Saturday’s programme by the highly individualistic Roger Marsh for the same artists, which fuses early madrigals with contemporary flourishes.

“It’s been fun creating such incredible programmes,” says Morton. He has indulged himself by including a personal favourite, Reich’s Variations for Vibes, Pianos and Strings, in the opening concert and will feature centre stage on Saturday afternoon in his own Desert Island Discs chat with halls director Svend Brown, but has been careful not to allow his own unhidden enthusiasm for minimalism to completely take over the weekend.

“The aim has been to offer an eclectic mix of exciting music to as wide an audience mix as possible. Sure, minimalism can encompass genres as diverse as heavy metal and classical, and consequently has a wide draw, but I didn’t want to limit the weekend experience.”

Morimur, with its quirky take on Bach, is a case in point. Morton explains its background, which stems from a theory by Helga Thoene, a German musicologist who has made a career out of spotting hidden references in Bach’s music, that the Partita was effectively a musical epitaph to the composer’s first wife, Maria Barbara, who died just before it was written.

“She has spotted numerous references to Bach’s own funeral chorales in this partita, believing that they may have been going round in his head as he wrote it. So what you’ll hear is Pekka Kuusisto playing the Bach, its movements interspersed with fragments of these chorales sung by the Hilliard,” Morton explains.