Having been at the forefront of British music-making since the heyday of the Swinging Sixties, the Nash Ensemble had every cause to mount an extravaganza at their spiritual home, Wigmore Hall. It consisted of a spectacular mosaic of works that seduced the ears, painted smiles on faces and touched that part of the spirit which delights in sensual rhythms. Seventeen of the Ensemble’s faithful co-creators, including conductor Martyn Brabbins and soprano Claire Booth, were on hand to set the seal on a sun-ripened day in the West End.
The Nash’s deep-seated commitment to promoting new work was exemplified by four world premieres: Acrobats on a Loose Wire by Simon Holt; Long Have I Lain Beside the Water by Helen Grime; Mantle by John Casken; and Canon by David Matthews. They were garlanded by three pieces from masters now absent from the stage: Stravinsky's Concertino; Elliot Carter's Mosaic; and the String Quintet by Peter Maxwell Davies. Such a diversity of styles, vocabulary, gestural proclivities and sonic means might have resulted in something of a mixed bag, but I think that the order in which they were performed, and the players getting under the skin and into the heads of all the pieces resulted in a first-class experience.
Stravinsky’s early marker of his drift into neo-classicism was lifted off the page by a wonderfully intense reading, with close attention to its constellation of expressive markings. Holt’s piece had something of the enigmatic quality of his creativity, which his teacher Anthony Gilbert called “a dark fire”. It was not comfortable music, but with such a title one would not expect it to be. Its edge-of-the-seat tension was well articulated by the players. Discomfort was also abroad in Grime’s setting of Zoe Gilbert’s text about sister rivalry, jealousy, and a drowning, Booth’s voice evoking the “bone-white” imagery in the text, the chill of which was imaginatively conjured by the setting. Gilbert referenced folk traditions, a trope which also surfaced in Max’s quintet. The two cellos obviously gives the piece a particular darkness, especially in the Slow Air; this was to the fore in a well-judged the performance.
Carter’s Mosaic celebrates the wizardry of harpist Carlos Salzedo. In the expert hands of Hugh Webb its array of inventions exploded dramatically into the auditorium. The composer knew how to handle the tension between the identity of the instrument and its particular character. Casken’s piece, a personal gift to Amelia Freedman, founder and guiding force of Nash Ensemble, was simply delightful; an effervescent collection of vivid colours for piano and wind quintet. In Matthews’s setting of four texts by Christopher Reid, Booth wonderfully evoked laments for Annoymals, Nightingales and Narwhals – and gives a thumbs-up to the letter O (Alone of the awkward quad of the alphabet…).
To round-off a magical evening there was a superb performance of an extraordinary work, Julian Anderson’s Van Gogh Blue. His mastery of harmonic invention is in a class of its own and it was here used to conjure up a rich sonic experience that moved from radiant dawn to Starry Starry Night with consummate ease. Brabbins skillfully steered the band though the densely-textured nuances of the score and effectively stage-managed the spatialisation of the sound which required the two clarinets to move around the auditorium. Kudos to Richard Hosford and Marie Lloyd for their itinerant contributions. At one point I found myself sitting just behind Lloyd and the lyricism of her playing I took as a personal gift. It was great to be there.
