It used to be the case that if classical performers wanted to fill an auditorium, programming music by Beethoven or Tchaikovsky would do the trick. These days the ‘Vaughan Williams effect’ appears to be a persuasive strategy. How else to explain the Crucible Playhouse packed to the rafters for a concert of otherwise relatively obscure string or oboe quartet music that would presumably have been unknown to most of the audience? But The Lark Ascending generates an almost Pavlovian reaction: audiences just can’t get enough of it. Sheltering under its wing, as it were, Ensemble 360’s string players and oboist Adrian Wilson brought blinking into the spotlight three works inspired by the Cobbett Prize (the English industrialist Walter Willson Cobbett’s award for the composition of ‘Phantasies’ in the vein of Purcell and his 17th-century ilk), not to mention a ‘Yorkshire premiere’ of a 2016 piece by Charlotte Bray.
It might be thought that programming three Cobbett competition entries called ‘Phantasy Quartet’ in the first half of the concert might be too much. Even if, hopefully, no one still subscribes to the “cowpat music” view of English pastoralism, what would distinguish Imogen Holst’s Phantasy String Quartet from Howells’ or from Britten’s, except for the fact that the last of these has an oboe replacing one of the violins? Ensemble 360’s rapt and emotionally sensitive performances brought out both similarities and differences. Holst’s and Howells’ pieces were near contemporaries from the 1920s, revealing a shared love for English folksong and its characteristic modal harmonies, but also a richly rhetorical approach to structure, each deploying an ‘arch’ shape so that the episodic qualities demanded by Cobbett’s competition specification should not lack cohesion.
The Britten, though, Cobbett entry or not, was something else: sharper, more acerbic, employing the march rhythms that so attracted the young composer. Wilson played the oboe part with deftness and vigour, his fellow performers responding to the shifts in mood and texture with intuitive skill. What all three works showed was just how much wonderful music we rarely get to hear in concert. After the Holst, second violin Claudia Ajmone-Marsan observed that the work was new to all the players, but would now be programmed more often. Their enthusiasm was shared audibly by those looking on.
Stepping away from the early 20th century, the second half opened with three of Purcell’s Three-part Fantasias, the viol parts transcribed for string trio by Peter Warlock. This is quirky, occasionally harmonically astringent music. The works felt modern, even if the young Purcell looked back into his century’s past for inspiration when he wrote them. Putting them alongside Charlotte Bray’s Bluer than Midnight was an excellent idea: 350 years apart or not, the works share a spiky exploitation of textures, moments of stillness and reflection, and a scurrying nervous energy that propels the more animated moments.