Ensemble 360 takes its name from its home space, Sheffield’s Crucible Playhouse, where the performers are surrounded on all sides by the audience, but this concert took place in the unusual setting of St Martin’s, Stoney Middleton, with its octagonal nave – one of only two in the UK – where the view from every pew focuses on the church’s small central space. Home from home, then, for these versatile musicians, although only three of the five performers were members of the “home team”. The indisposition of Ben Nabarro had led to an urgent appeal to exceptional Canadian violinist Corey Cerovsek and his once-owned-by-Paganini violin, who was, astonishingly, able to fulfil first violinist duties for the entire festival on the basis of about ten days’ rehearsal time – no mean feat. To say that he fitted in seamlessly here is high praise indeed.
The main work, Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet, was performed as dusk fell and the church was illuminated only by lights on the performers’ music stands. It’s a work of relentless drive, bleakness of vision and intense foreboding, unsurprisingly given that it was written in the aftermath of Schubert’s diagnosis with the syphilis which would kill him. The atmospheric setting suited its haunted energy, particularly in the funereal tread of the slow movement’s variations on the Lied that inspired it. Cerovsek pushed the tempi along in the final two movements, providing no respite save for the third movement’s major key Trio section. “Nothing here at all: leave well alone and stick to writing songs,” declared Ignaz Schuppanzich (whose musicians premiered many of Beethoven’s quartets) after a private play-through. One wonders how he could have been so deaf to its astonishing qualities. The standing ovation at the end of Ensemble 360’s performance showed how wrong he was.
Sibelius’ one mature String Quartet in D minor took up most of the first half of the programme, another work haunted by its composer’s mortality, written at a time when Sibelius was undergoing treatment for throat cancer. He clearly loved it (“The kind of thing that brings a smile to your lips at the hour of death,” he wrote to his wife), though it is rarely programmed these days. We are immersed in dialogue from the very start, in the conversation of first violin and cello, and the demonstration of the work’s subtitle, Voces Intimae (Intimate Voices), is readily apparent, though what these voices are saying remains enigmatic to the end. The keystone of this five movement work (Sibelius exploiting the “arch” structure before Bartók, it seems) is the slow third movement, a deeply introspective quest for serenity – and the point at which Sibelius wrote “voces intimae” over a copy of the score. Ensemble 360 played it as though there were no doubts about its merits, and though at times it felt like an orchestral work shorn of its brass and woodwind parts, its bardic qualities were compellingly evoked.
The concert opened with a short work by Alfred Schnittke, Hymnus II, for cello and double bass, the latter played by the evening’s other guest performer, Philip Nelson, leader of the double bass section of the Royal Northern Sinfonia. The work’s enigmatic contemplation, interrupted by percussive pizzicato passages before disappearing into wisps of string harmonics, was undercut somewhat by the dispiriting intrusion, twice, of a third voice – a mobile phone. I’m sure I was not alone in wishing the performers had played the work again.
