Music doesn’t exist in a vacuum. In concerts, we come to new pieces of music armed with expectations that have been set up by the title, by a programmatic description, or what we might know of the composer – at the very least even knowledge of a nationality or era can affect what comes into the listener’s mind. So as I think back to Royal Northern Sinfonia’s New Music from the North chamber concert, I wonder how much my abiding impressions of cold, sparse beauty arose just from knowing that the composers came from Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Estonia. If the composers had been Spanish or Italian, would I have had parched sun-soaked landscapes in my mind instead of brittle snow-laded pine needles?
The opening piece of the concert gave us visual clues not just with nationality but with a title and description too: Hans Abrahamsen’s Walden (‘Woods’) for wind quintet was inspired by the memoirs of Henry David Thoreau, a 19th century poet and philosopher who spent two years living a minimalist lifestyle in the American forest. Abrahamsen reflects on Thoreau’s writing with music stripped down to its bare essentials, just stopping short of the point where we start to ask questions about what makes sound into music. Later, the music became more complex, ending in a broken, distorted dance, but the first movement was constructed from little more than pairs of notes, played with icy stillness by the five members of Royal Northern Sinfonia.
Sometimes place and history do leave an indelible mark on a composer’s output: Finland has a long tradition of clarinet playing, arising from the country’s folk music, and from Finland’s first composer of note before Sibelius, Bernhard Henrik Crusell, and today a number of Finnish composers have written works for clarinettist Kari Kriikku, including Magnus Lindberg. His Clarinet Concerto demands crazy extended techniques; tonight’s work, his Clarinet Quintet, also written for Kriikku demanded nothing more than continuously virtuosic playing. Streams of rapid notes were visible across the hall as a black blur across the music, the whole piece a showcase for Timothy Orpen’s talent, supported on a gentle cushion of strings. What was impressive was not just the fluency of Orpen’s playing, but the way he navigated the rapid leaps with an absolute even tone, that never lost its opulence either during the acrobatics, or when Lindberg pushes the clarinet right to the top of its register – I have never heard high notes on a clarinet sound so sweet.
The string quartet accompanying Orpen had already had their moment in the light, playing Larsson’s String Quartet no.3 Op.65, a piece that was less obviously ‘northern’, than the others, a well-polished, traditional string quartet, rooted in mid-20th century neo-classicism. The first movement alternated angry, jagged rhythms with a plangent solo line from first violin Kyra Humphreys over pizzicato. After a wistful opening the second movement launched into a pulsating tarantella-like dance, before the quartet died away in a nostalgically autumnal largo. The piece came alive with excellent ensemble playing from the quartet, particularly as melodic lines passed between the parts in the first movement, and in the gentle breaths of the last.