Just 48 hours before this concert started, cellist Adrian Brendel was presumably going about his business as normal, unaware that – an urgent call and some focused rehearsal time later – he would be here in Sheffield to cover for Ensemble 360’s cellist, Gemma Rosefield, who had flu. The outcome was even more impressive when you consider that none of the works in this programme were mainstream territory: the early Rachmaninov Piano Trio no. 1 in G minor, Prokofiev’s only occasionally heard Cello Sonata and Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet no. 2 in F major. Perhaps there was greater than usual adrenalin coursing through the players’ collective veins, but the performances were a triumph for all concerned.
The central work, and the chance for Brendel to take a starring role, was the Prokofiev sonata, a piece originally written for the duo of Mstislav Rostropovich and Sviatoslav Richter. No pressure, then! Performances are few and far between – pianist Tim Horton, in his almost 20 years with this ensemble, has turned his hand to a huge range of repertoire, but he pointed out beforehand that this was the first time he’d ever played the work. The sonata gripped from its first bars, Brendel playing the opening paragraph’s deeply sonorous line with burnished tone. That first movement climaxed with both players imitating a kind of convulsive ringing of bells, before subsiding into a shimmering detachment.
Brendel and Horton played the Scherzo for laughs... or rather, with an eye to the sort of ambivalent irony perhaps more typical of Prokofiev’s contemporary, Shostakovich, treading carefully before the Soviet censors. The affirmative finale, and particularly its broad C major peroration, would surely have pleased the authorities. Brendel emphasised its heroic but never facile quality, and the cheers that greeted the close of the piece were well deserved.
Before the Prokofiev, Brendel and Horton were joined by Ensemble 360’s first violin, Benjamin Nabarro, in a performance of some youthful Rachmaninov. The composer wrote two piano trios, both perplexingly called Trio élégiaque, and in the single-movement first one, written when he was only 18, there is a clear debt to the sound world of Tchaikovsky. The piano, unsurprisingly, dominates proceedings, and Horton conjured vivid colours from the instrument as the piece shifted between elegiac and more spirited moods before settling into something sombrely funereal at the close.
If we began with some ersatz Tchaikovsky, we ended with the real thing. Ensemble 360’s string players have a real love for Tchaikovsky’s quartets, something Nabarro expounded on before the work began, and it’s certainly the case that the second quartet needs passionate investment on the part of its performers. Special mention should go to Claudia Ajmone-Marsan on second violin and Rachel Roberts on viola, sawing away at their semiquavers almost throughout with barely any moment in the limelight, but contributing to the quartet’s rich, dense texture, the result sounding full but never cluttered. The first violin takes the principal role in the drama and Nabarro shone here. There was a touch of the gypsy violin to his playing, glimpses of portamento in his handling of the string line in the outer movements in particular. Underneath it all was Brendel’s cello, imperturbable but expressive throughout. If the soulful Andante ma non tanto touched something of the world-weariness of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, the exhilarating release of the folksy finale ensured much foot-stomping and cheering at the close.
