Berkeley Ensemble play Howell, Howells and Elgar at the English Music Festival

The English Music Festival always occupies the splendid spaces of Dorchester Abbey in the second May Bank Holiday weekend, and this was the 18th edition. JB McEwen’s Nugae; Seven Bagatelles for String Quartet made an intriguing curtain-raiser, coming from this distinguished Scottish music academic and administrator. He seems to have held his own compositions in less regard than those of his colleagues, but these short pieces have an appeal of their own. The opening Lament spoke of gentle regret in its opening on the viola, but progressed to a deeper sorrow. Two later items in the set, the third called Peat Reek and the fifth, The Druh Loch, also had something of the same attractive melancholy. The final piece, Red Murdoch, a swift folk-like dance, drew plenty of applause.

More brief dance items followed in Frank Bridge’s ten-minute triptych of Miniatures for Piano Trio, in which the first violin and the cellist of the Berkeley Ensemble were joined by Simon Callaghan on piano. The opening Minuet was suitably galant in manner, with an ingratiating trio section. The ensuing Valse Russe sounded neither very French or Russian, although some composers from those countries might have been proud to have written a work of such charm. The closing Hornpipe was rather too decorous to invoke a crew of jolly jack tars stamping on deck, at least until its brilliant Presto coda.

This versatile group, enthusiasts for neglected corners of British music, now returned to their quartet format for the String Quartet of Dorothy Howell. Indeed the concert was entitled “Dorothy Howell’s World”. Hers was a familiar tale of abundant talent and early success followed by relative neglect as a composer, then a long career as a teacher at the Royal Academy of Music. This quartet was given privately there in 1933, and then all but lost. Of no great duration, its single movement still had plenty of invention, in both harmony and infectious rhythm, closing with a desolate slow envoi.

The Berkeley Ensemble’s violist Dan Shilladay now joined Callaghan to play Herbert Howells’s Elegy for Viola and Piano. This moving work memorialises a friend of Howells, a viola player, Francis Purcell Warren, killed in action in 1916 aged just 21. For all the interest in the preceding items, Howells’ invention raised the game, and formed a fine close to the first half. The tone Shilladay drew from his instrument was highly evocative, blooming in the spacious acoustic of Dorchester abbey. Using only the lightest vibrato, his phrasing echoed back down the years to that tragic conflict, becoming a lament for all the fallen.

Elgar of course set Binyon’s poem For the Fallen, and wrote several other war-related pieces. The war had ended by the time his noble Piano Quintet was finished, but its elegiac slow movement conveys the same atmosphere. The work is launched though with a Moderato introduction to a sturdy Allegro, and while the best of Elgar is hardly found here, the Berkeley Ensemble’s committed playing made the most of it. No apology is needed for the sublime Adagio, its opening viola phrase drawing us in, as it expands into a 40-bar paragraph of the greatest eloquence, superbly realised by these players. The finale cannot quite match or banish the haunting quality of that music, but was played with all the energy needed to have the smallish afternoon audience producing an enthusiastic forte of their own.