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Shoreditch Church, London
27 June 2003
Britten Sinfonia
Nicholas Cleobury, conductor
For the [Spitalfields] festival’s final concert, the fare was almost all English, as Britten Sinfonia under Nicholas Cleobury played an electrifying Elgar Introduction and Allegro, a warmly textured Tippett Fantasia Concertante, and exhilarating accounts of works by Joanthan Dove and Colin Matthews.
The latter’s contribution was the UK premiere of his Two Pieces for Strings. The first, Little Chaconne, was an interestingly dark and stormy journey, begun by solo cello, caught up in galloping and sliding strings, wading through showers of pizzicato, closing with a solo violin trilling away not unlike a Vaughan Williams Lark. Then Fall Dances, a short rhythmic excursion with a wonderfully still middle. Both pieces produced a fine, sinewy intensity in the strings.
But it was for Dove mainly that the applause deservedly rained down at the end…his fun-packed Moonlight Revels, based on the Titania-Oberon-Bottom shenanigans of A Midsummer Night’s Dream…brought out a fantastic cock-fight between two virtuosos, John Wallace on trumpet and John Harle on saxophone, all egged on by some wonderfully mischievous string-playing.
The Times
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