Jazz luminaries Charles Mingus, Ray Brown, Esperanza Spalding and Dave Holland are among many to have led their ensembles from the bass and it is also rumoured – but of course disputed – that the late Lemmy Kilmister led the rock band Motörhead from the bass. It’s less common in classical music, but I do hope Will Duerden gives his charming Royal Northern Sinfonia ensemble another outing.
This was an eclectic treasure chest of rarely heard delights, despatched with the easy virtuosity now common among contemporary orchestral players and overseen by the microphone-shy Duerden, who despite his incredible artistry was unable to give us the information needed to navigate 350 years of bass-forward material. It was easy to miss that there was in fact a printed programme, accessed via a tiny QR code at the base of the printed handout. Those who succeeded (it took me seven attempts) in downloading the programme would have discovered that Heinrich Biber’s remarkable Battalia contains a musical rendering of drunken soldiers singing three different songs at once (predating Charles Ives by around 250 years!), and ends not in triumph as one might expect, but with a deeply moving lament for the wounded and dying. This was an important detail which we needed to know, and I can only guess that the composer’s intentions were thus lost on the majority of the audience.
The only dull spot came with Max Bruch’s frequently heard lament Kol Nidrei, played by Duerden with an unearthly beauty. Unfortunately he also kept his eyes shut most of the time and the coherence of the music suffered from the lack of direction for the rest of the ensemble.
The high points of the evening were three pieces by Edgar Meyer, introduced by Duerden with winning enthusiasm, performed with empathy and great energy alongside his principal collaborators Samuel Staples (violin) and Edvard Pogossian (cello). I regret never having heard this music before. It speaks with a genuinely new voice, both rare and desperately needed in contemporary classical music, combining elements of modern classical style, jazz, blues and bluegrass, utilising polyrhythms, extreme contrapuntal textures – even at one point, Hocket – but all contained within a recognisable structure, often circular in form, not necessarily as in the old A:B:A form but more akin to the written-down diagrams of a Raga, for example.
Václav Pichl’s Concerto in C major owed a great deal to his friend Haydn’s cello concerto in the same key but was a pleasant outing for the instrument. Giovanni Bottesini’s Capriccio di Bravura was exactly as described in the title, and Holst’s St Paul’s Suite was played at speed and warmly received by the near capacity audience.
