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Britten
Sinfonia at Lunch
December/ January/February/March
Tours to Birmingham,
Cambridge, Krakow, London and Norwich
16 - 20 December
13 - 18 January
1 - 7 February
9 - 18 March
The
Independent Editorial and preview with Richard Causton
Michael Church 12 December
2007
From Krakow to Birmingham con
brio
When the Britten Sinfonia give
their lunchtime concert at Birmingham's Town Hall on Monday, they will
be fresh off the plane from Krakow, where they will have just played the
same programme, and on successive days next week, they will repeat it
in three other British cities. Nice for them to get their hand in with
their Mozart and Ravel; nice for the composer Richard Causton, whose Divertimento
they will also play, to hear his new work five times in a row. "With
a piece that takes risks like this," he says, "it will be good
to hear it so much – we'll get a more rounded picture."
It was originally called As
Kingfishers Catch Fire, from the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem: "It's
about the extravagance and ebullience and fertility and overblownness
of nature," explains Causton. "The way there are always five
more species of any animal than there should be need for. When a piece
is gestating, I put the idea up on the wall, and this poem puts it perfectly.
Like the animals in the poem, I want the instruments to be unashamedly
themselves. That will mean a lot of open fifths in the strings."
But will audiences find it
accessible? "Yes, though that's not my conscious aim. I just want
my music to serve its idea as clearly as is possible. I've given people
a road-map of the piece in the programme."
At 36, Causton is one of our
more successful young composers, in that his work gets regularly performed,
but that's only relative: if a piece gets performed once a year, as his
tend to, that's pretty good for this cash-starved field. Is the climate
for composers getting worse? Are commissions and performances harder to
obtain? "Yes on both counts. The Britten Sinfonia are unusual in
that they can still offer them, and can still sell out their hall each
time. They've created an audience that trusts them."
Britten
Sinfonia at Lunch, January
The Eastern Daily Press
Christopher Smith, 18 January
2008
The Assembly House, Norwich
A particularly large audience
turned out for the lunchtime recital by the Britten Sinfonia. It was delighted
by lively performances of three compositions.
Though strikingly contrasted
and from different periods, they were all for string sextet, a regular
quartet plus an extra viola and cello, which meant greater solidity and
warmth of tone.
First came the Ricercar from
Bach's Musical Offering. Starting with a long theme for viola that was
an evident spur to elaboration, this was a work that invited us to follow
through patterns of ordered complexity.
All the time, though, the intellectual
side was balanced by both beauty of sound and precision of phrasing.
Helen Grime's Into the Faded
Air, which the Sinfonia premiered in Krakow only five days earlier, came
across as a study in miniatures.
With four movements in no more
than 10 minutes, it still made a real impression by its commitment to
variety. After the impact of the jagged opening, slower, quieter episodes
took on greater character, with the creation of opportunities for individual
instruments to make their particular contributions.
Taking us back to the safe
haven of the mid 19th century, Brahms' first sextet was more relaxed and
longer, with movements of almost symphonic dimensions. It was full of
melody and heart-warming crescendos. Pizzicato created a throbbing pulse
where needed, and vigorous down-bowing expressed exuberant energy.
The players were evidently
relaxed, even smiling at one another, as they enjoyed the emotional vigour
and unlimited inventiveness of a young composer who had not yet come to
take life too seriously.
Britten
Sinfonia at Lunch, February
The Independent ***** Five
Stars
Michael Church, 8 February
2008
An unusual lunchtime audience
at the Wigmore: a generous sprinkling of students, a posse of new-music
grandees, and some multi-racial groups of young schoolchildren. We'll
come to the children later, but the students and grandees were there to
welcome the latest piece (ink barely dry, according to the Britten Sinfonia's
leader) from that revered and influential university professor of composition,
Robin Holloway. Entitled "Five Temperaments", and scored for
wind quintet, it would last a mere 10 minutes, but hopes were high.
Holloway's disarming programme note said that the temperaments in question
would not be the usual four; he declined to specify them, but indicated
that each would be a state of mind to which everyone is prey. And the
first came as a physical shock. But one quickly sensed that the angular
shrieks and ear-battering blasts that rent the air were under cool control
as the musical lines answered and overlaid each other. The second mood
was downbeat too, but the sheer craftsmanship with which it was constructed
had an invigorating effect.
Beneath Holloway's surface
modernism lurks a German Romantic sensibility, and this quality came out
strongly as the work progressed. His lyrical instincts repeatedly led
these spiky instrumental conversations to resolve themselves in song;
even when no simple tonality was discernible, his brightly coloured music,
which at one point exploited the addition of a cor anglais and bass clarinet,
felt rooted and secure. The fact that this deceptive little piece could
hold its own against the Beethoven that preceded it, and the Ravel that
followed, is a measure of Holloway's achievement.
But what were those children
doing at this celebration of cutting-edge art? The answer lies in the
Britten Sinfonia's unique scope and ambition. It has no principal conductor
or artistic director, but chooses to work with a wide range of top-flight
players, and to perform a steady stream of new works. The itinerary of
which this concert formed part began improbably in Krakow, and ends with
a lunchtime bash in the Norwich Assembly House; the fact that it fills
houses almost everywhere testifies to the loyalty it has built up. With
Imogen Cooper at the keyboard, Beethoven's "Quintet for Piano and
Wind Quartet" and Ravel's "Mother Goose Suite" here deservedly
went down a treat.
Britten
Sinfonia at Lunch, February
The Times **** Four Stars
Richard Morrison, 8 February
2008
Robin Holloway's new piece,
Five Temperaments, is the epitome of chamber music. It's an intelligent
interplay of sophisticated ideas, in which the five wind players seem
to converse and take on personalities like characters in one of those
quick-witted plays by Tom Stoppard or Alan Bennett. And it's also the
epitome of Robin Holloway, the most shrinking of shrinking violets, who
has nevertheless produced sheaves of beautifully fashioned music in a
career stretching back to 1970.
As befits a Cambridge professor
of composition, his work is grounded in a profound understanding of older
music. Holloway's first love is the Romantics. You can hear that in his
fondness for sepia-tinted lyricism, ripe but never clogged harmonies and
twilight moods.
But in Five Temperaments there's
a much older influence at work: the fiendishly clever isorhythmic motets
concocted by medieval composers such as Machaut and Dufay, in which the
same theme will be layered on top of itself in several different time
values.
In Holloway's hands, this device
is no mere academic exercise. It helps him to construct highly dramatic
structures - each with an illusion of acceleration and then withdrawal
- while allowing what is recognisably the same melodic contour to bind
the music cogently together.
But that's merely to speak
of the nuts and bolts. Underpinning all this is an emotional journey.
The “five temperaments” of the title clearly refer not only
to the five instrumentalists, but also to the five little movements that
whisk us through a kaleidoscope of moods, mostly on the melancholic side,
in barely ten minutes.
As with everything Holloway
writes, there are more exquisite nuances here than big, bold statements.
And his own temperament dictates that he ends not with a bang but a whimper.
Nine composers out of ten would have made a finale out of his jazzy, mercurial
penultimate movement.
But how good that, in this
noisy new century, composers are still producing works of such subtle,
understated content and impeccable craftsmanship. It was superbly played
by members of the Britten Sinfonia, who earlier - joined by Imogen Cooper
- had given a polished account of Beethoven's early E-flat Quintet for
Piano and Wind.
Britten
Sinfonia at Lunch, February
The Eastern Daily Press
Michael Drake, 8 February 2008
St Andrew's Hall, Norwich
This delightful Jarrold-sponsored
series of concerts by members of the full orchestra continued yesterday
and such is their popularity that not a seat was unfilled.
The piano and wind quintet made an immediate impact, with Beethoven's
Op 16 in E flat showing the composer's somewhat rare romantic side. Opening
with a firm keyboard root, answering phrases were always forward-looking
and in the central Andante all six displayed exemplary musical control
while one could feel the Rondo's radiating joy.
A well-judged alteration to the order placed Robin Holloway's Five Temperaments,
on its world premier tour, in the programme's centre. Précising a number
of life's situations, it ranged from a fairly chaotic opening through
a spring-like peace to an underlay of calm strength and moving to a musical
debate - or perhaps discussion - until ending in relative concord or at
least agreement. Moody it is, but do I interpret the sections as the composer
meant? It is a listener's choice.
Finally, we heard a transcription by oboist David Walker of Ravel's relatively
genteel Mother Goose Suite. Originally written for piano duet, with some
doubling of instruments, the sinfonia perambulated its way through the
fairy stories, taking the listener into another and ethereal world while
confirming their musical coherence and flexibility.
Britten
Sinfonia at Lunch, March
The Eastern Daily Press
Christopher Smith, 14 March
2008
The Assembly House, Norwich
The usual Britten Sinfonia
lunchtime menu of early and modern music once again was tasty and refreshing.
For starters we had short Renaissance
dances by Anthony Holborne.
They were played by a brass
group that first asserted sonorous power, then impressed even more with
sprightly delicacy.
Matthew Locke's Music for his
Majesty's Sagbutts and Cornetts also lived up to its magnificent title.
Oliver Knussen's Masks was
quite different. Written for a flute, almost solo apart from a few tinkles
on glass chimes, this five-minute work was made up of a series of concise
character pieces with little bursts of contrasting emotion.
A new commission on its world
premiere tour, Pawel Lukaszewski's Concertino brought the pianist Huw
Watkins to join the brass.
The first of three brief movements
was stern and ominous but the mood became more relaxed in the second,
with the brass muted and piano scattering arpeggios across the score.
A Rondo made an emphatic finale.
The Capriccio by Leos Janacek,
whose Glagolitic Mass will be a highlight of the Norfolk and Norwich Festival
in May, was the longest and most complex in the programme. The composer
knew how to use the flute's distinctive voice when other instruments were
louder.
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