Despite its unwieldy name, this classical supergroup has the power of a lion and the grace of a gazelle. However, if the virtuosic Aurora Orchestra Principal Players plan to make a habit of playing the Nash Ensemble at their own game, they’ll need with a catchier tag than those four words. Billed under the heading ‘Echoes of Youth’, the programme at King’s Place was an attractive ragbag of unlikely bedfellows. Was that a misleading strapline, though? Perhaps, given that Janáček was in his 70th year when he composed Mládí. Still, the title means ‘Youth’, so why not.
The core ensemble of a wind quintet (flute, oboe, horn, clarinet and bassoon) was joined here by the sumptuous bass clarinet of Lewis Graham, whose brief sojourn on the platform had me screaming (inwardly) for more. Janáček employed his two low instruments as a counterweight to the higher voices – the latter included an occasional piccolo intervention from flautist Jane Mitchell – and in adding this ballast he made a persuasive case for a wind sextet as some future norm. In particular the third movement Vivace tripped as lightly as a Mendelssohn Scherzo, with a closing curlicue of the sweetest delicacy, while the Allegro animato finale closed on a collective, kaleidoscopic flourish. Pure Janáček, pure joy.
At 28, Mozart was at the height of his powers when he composed the Quintet in E flat major for Piano and Winds, K452. Mitchell’s flute gave way to the piano of John Reid for this florid and richly textured work, a concerto in all but name (albeit minus strings), whose presentation was only marred by balance issues. The piano’s distance behind the other musicians adversely affected the sound picture in the central Larghetto, while the otherwise admirable horn playing of Benjamin Hartnell-Booth succumbed to the occasional blare when he communed with his inner trombone.
Judith Weir’s intriguingly titled Airs from Another Planet is an absorbing 12-minute composition from 1986. Alas, Weir's backstory for this four-movement piano sextet is more colourful than the work itself, whose music is more abstract than representational for most of its duration. That’s a shame, because her founding conceit placed a party of prospective Scottish explorers and their descendants in isolation for generations on a remote island in order to prepare them psychologically for a future relocation to Mars. Over the years their memories of traditional folk tunes fade, leaving only this vestigial sequence of short pieces whose Scottish tang has gone with the wind.
The resultant score is a wash of textures in which spiky melodies sit alongside mellower moods, the latter akin to pressing firmly on the soft pedal. Weir’s second movement made a vivid impact: instrumental writing was individually voiced rather than choric, with melodic beetling (Mitchell’s piccolo again) and scampering little tunes. These fascinating Airs resemble fragmentary memories, processed and homogenised by time, but they do not really echo that dreamy back story.
Poulenc’s Sextet made a fizzing climax to the Auroras' (now there's a name) variegated concert. Written when Poulenc was in his mid-30s, the Sextet has gained substantial currency in recent years – and deservedly so. It is a showpiece for piano and wind quintet, notionally in four movements but sounding like twice as many thanks to the episodic writing. The central Andantino is the star turn: its lush, chromatic melodies intertwine like tender lovers, while Poulenc includes a chant-like figure that anticipates the Salve Regina he would write for Dialogues des Carmélites a quarter of a century later.
