Mozart to Poulenc in a concert of masterworks from Ensemble 360 and guests

One organisational strand of this year’s Sheffield Chamber Music Festival encouraged host performers, Ensemble 360, each to choose a ‘desert island’ work, which would feature at one of the festival events. This concert contained three – all bona fide masterpieces – though the fourth item, far less well known, was not outshone in comparison. The variety of programming, taking in an oboe sonata, a quintet for piano and winds, a string sextet and a string octet, ensured a diverse and always engaging experience for the almost full Thursday afternoon crowd.

To start at the end, the young Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht brought the concert to a vivid conclusion. Cellist Gemma Rosefield spoke passionately beforehand on behalf of this work’s emphasis on “love and forgiveness”, and three string players from Ensemble 360 and three guests from the Elias Quartet lived up to that ideal in a performance that was by turns turbulent, tender, impassioned and, by the end, ecstatic. The lush post-Brahmsian harmony never threatened to slide over into muddiness, even when all six performers were playing full-throttle in the intimate space of the Crucible Playhouse.

Before the interval, a work from the end of a composer’s career rather than its beginning saw oboist Adrian Wilson and pianist Tim Horton give a touching performance of Poulenc’s valedictory Oboe Sonata. As Wilson suggested, there are intimations of mortality in the lamenting final movement, ostensibly focused on the sonata’s dedication to the memory of Prokofiev but, at its first performance, a memorial to the recently deceased Poulenc himself. Wilson and Horton’s was a sober reading, with less of the mercurial playfulness than we usually expect in Poulenc, but instead a kind of steely determination to endure, come what may.

After the Poulenc, these two were joined by two further wind players from Ensemble 360 and guest bassoonist Jonathan Davies for one of Mozart’s finest chamber compositions, the Quintet for Piano and Winds. It’s extraordinary to think that this was the first ever composition for these forces, and the performance showed Mozart’s perfect mastery of wind writing, almost operatic in its intertwining of voices, and the beautiful control of dialogue between winds and piano that was to be such a feature of Mozart’s mature piano concertos. Long ago this work featured on Ensemble 360’s first CD release, and in the intervening years their performance has become richer and more mature. Though it’s perhaps unfair to single out individuals, Naomi Atherton’s horn playing here was hugely impressive, whether engaged in flighty dialogue with the piano or as part of the wind band.

If these three compositions were familiar to most of the audience, the opening work was some distance off the beaten track. Shostakovich’s Two Pieces for String Octet dates from just after his First Symphony, which might make it seem like the creation of an established composer, but he was a mere 19 years old and still a student at the time. The work shows off Shostakovich’s radical, iconoclastic temperament. His savaging at the hands of the Soviet establishment over his Fifth Symphony was over a decade away, but you could guarantee that Stalin would not have liked these short movements for string ensemble if they had come to his attention. The opening elegy was sombre, played with suitable gravitas by the combined Ensemble 360 and Elias strings, and guest violinist Lucy Gould, but it was the extraordinary Scherzo that followed which allowed the players free rein to enjoy the biting satire generated by the scrunching dissonances and sneering glissandi. The performance was a tour de force.