One of the joys of music festivals is the possibility of listening to music in curious places, occasionally at curious times. Three members of Ensemble 360 – Benjamin Nabarro (violin), Rachel Roberts (viola) and Gemma Rosefield (cello) – had played the music performed in this concert once already (at 05:00!) by the time they were applauded onstage again at a slightly less bleary-eyed 07:30. Actually ‘onstage’ is a bit of a misnomer. The venue was the Samuel Worth Chapel, the centrepiece building of Sheffield General Cemetery, designed in 1836 (“Egypto-Greek” according to Pevsner) and once derelict but now restored as a venue for, amongst other things, chamber music concerts. An audience of roughly 50, sitting in two concentric circles around the performers, made for the sort of intimate connection with the musicians which is Ensemble 360’s speciality.
And the music? Bach’s Goldberg Variations was clearly written for a two-manual harpsichord, though that hasn’t stopped pianists performing the work since Rudolf Serkin almost a century ago. However, Dmitri Sitkovetsky’s arrangement for string trio has, since it was produced for Bach’s tercentenary, become an established favourite with string players, and it was this that members of Ensemble 360 performed.
The chapel’s acoustic was bright and somewhat unyielding. One consequence was that every note was pin-sharp and clear in focus, leaving the performers with absolutely nowhere to hide. Replacing the almost instantaneous acoustic decay of a keyboard instrument with the sustained string lines allowed the piece to ‘sing’ in ways that not only brought out the vocal quality of the Aria that bookends the variations, but also enriched the epic Adagio of Variation 25, so that it emerged full of tender pathos. There was much fascination, too, in the music’s textural variety: three variations were arranged for just two voices, and elsewhere the pizzicato of Variation 19 came as a startling contrast to the previous bowing.
These three players have performed together so often by now that their response to the music revealed a single, unified vision. If this was most evident in the taut patterns of the faster variations, such as in the flashing interplay of the upper string lines in Variation 23, it also gave the work’s more meditative moments a kind of sober melancholy, the three instruments spooling out their intertwined melodic threads in the Canone alla settima of Variation 21.
An arrangement of this sort makes exceptional demands on all three players, so it suggests no kind of technical superiority to regard Nabarro as the primus inter pares of the group. The violin’s voice, as the top line in the arrangement, not only leads the way in most of these variations but sets the tone for each variation’s character, from the almost rustic jig of Variation 7 to the quicksilver flourishes of Variation 26. But in the end, as each player in turn negotiated the complex figurations of Variation 28, picking out the melodic line whilst simultaneously playing demisemiquaver trills, this was a collective triumph.
One had the sense that almost every member of the audience knew this music intimately, and there were smiles of both appreciation and anticipation as the declamatory chordal grandeur of Variation 29 gave way to the sense of ‘coming home’ characterising Variation 30’s Quodlibet. This was warmly generous and humane playing of music that keeps its artistry down to earth. Then, after the hushed reprise of the Aria, silence hung in the air between performers and listeners for several seconds, until applause filled the space in a wave of joyful appreciation.
