Sheffield Chamber Music Festival 2024

Sheffield residents of Ensemble 360 ​​anticipated the generosity, granting his requests, among other things, for the screening of a silent film, probably the first (1908) to have a live score by a major composer (Saint-Saëns), and for a choir to PART At the vision from the reins, a rare work by Augusta Holmès, the muse of Franck and Renoir. The open heart paid off, as it did last year with pianist Kathryn Stott. The 2023 experience was enough to make me addicted to both this remarkable, multi-faceted city and one of the most vibrant chamber music festivals anywhere. I only wish I had been there for all of this: I missed, among other things, a sunrise wind quintet concert in the General Cemetery, Holmès in a very unusual program, and – after my departure – Roderck Williams in Ravel’s Chansons madécasses and Fauré’s La bonne chanson. Fauré was the main subject this year, his centenary year, and I got to hear and relive some of his chamber masterpieces during my time in Sheffield. But it seemed fitting that, while last year’s dazzling opening concert ended with a performance of Saint-Saëns’ perfect, chameleonic Septet for Trumpet, Strings and Piano, 2024 should meet a serious step with the most prolific among the French; if there was any revelatory celebration of his achievements in the 100th year of his death, 2021, we missed it. Yet here we were on Tuesday night with a heady celebration.

opening work, Concert morceau for horn and piano, was mainly a way to highlight Ensemble 360’s wonderful horn player Naomi Atherton in tandem with her infinitely adaptable pianist Tim Horton – and how typical of this collegiate festival, in her pre-performance speech, Atherton singled out the following instrumentalist, Ursula Leveaux, for inspiring her to show how much you could stand out in an orchestra during their time with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. But Leveaux’s work, the Bassoon Sonata, set off a journey of discovery, an epiphany of Saint-Saëns’ compressed, touchable, yet somehow profoundly serious late style picture above with Tim Horton’s). Like Nielsen with his wonderful original concertos for clarinet and flute, the Indian Summer Sonatas were to honor a wind quintet. Saint-Saëns went a bit further before his death at the age of 86, adding oboe and clarinet accompaniments to the Bassoon Sonata. All three first movements convey the ineffable, as Monsieur Fauré does quite differently; compact structures then do unexpected things. As Leveaux pointed out, every voice of which the bassoon is capable – and which so few operate with real honor – is there, while, as Adrian Wilson showed us the following night, the brilliance of the sonata for his instrument extends in an ad lib dialogue with piano. Horton shared equal honors in both works.

The wind instrument receives surprisingly beautiful and original phrases in the score for Assassination of the Duke of Guise, a 20-minute film directed by Charles le Bardy and Andre Calmettes, notable mainly for its presentation of 16th-century gentlemen’s stockings. The fourth sitting area of ​​the Crucible octagonal playhouse had been replaced with a large screen; conductor George Morton achieved perfect synchronization among his 12 players (picture above).

On an evening when the space was more or less occupied by musicians, we had too The smells of Paris, a joyous and goofy ‘Grande Marche’ at the UK premiere in 2004, Isserlis, where the song was not so important, but the special effects that freed the players from their usual roles (I found the whistle rather catchy Atherton’s nightingales). and I want one). Fortunately, the anticipated gunshot at the end was a quiet one.

Japes abundant in Carnival of animals – another camera work in its original version – it certainly worked; Never have I giggled more at Elephant playing a Berlioz sylph and Mendelssohn’s Puck than in the hands of double bassist Philip Nelson (picture above), and Isserlis, who had come from Frankfurt to hear three concerts before his own participation, gave applause for it. But what fascinated here were the almost supernatural beauties, starting with, of all things, the Offenbach tin turtles – held to a strangely energized pianissimo from the unison strings with pianists Horton and (a surprise to see her name on the flyer) Ivana Gavrić. .

The keyboard mysteries were magically done too, even drawing attention away from clarinetist Robert Plane’s wooden cuckoo – well, maybe not his flipped joke before he disappeared – until, of course, we got to the disastrous piano exercises of at no. 11. Gemma Rosefield. the swan (the picture below) brought tears to her eyes by her very restraint: no weakness here, just exquisite manipulation of the score’s 11 o’clock number. That the performance as a whole could be so moving raises the question of why the composer wanted the work to be suppressed during his lifetime. Its variety is the very essence of Saint-Saëns. I would have given a lot to hear Plane in the third of the late sonatas, but he extended the spotlight in a different way, holding the golden thread through Adès’ slow-fast labyrinth. Alchemy. This four-movement clarinet quintet was composed for Mark Simpson and descends hypnotically to the basset’s extended lower register (Plane gave us a preliminary demo). ‘A Sea Change (…those are pearls…)’ and ‘Lachrymae’, with its very subterranean reference to Dowland, are elegies exploiting dark timbres, with ‘The Woods So Wild’ as a fascinating moto perpetuo contrast between them; but it is less clear how the finale, “Divisions on a Lute-song: Wedekind’s Round,” relates to the rest, apart from the title. As in the model, Berg’s final scene introduction Lulu, Adès subjects London barrel organ melody to distorting mirror variations. Perhaps the overarching theme is death, but as so often with this composer, you always wish the beginnings of depth would go deeper. An evocative, finely tuned performance, all the same.

In an epic program, Ravel’s miniature mastery is simply perfect Berceuse sur le nom de building and Messager is graceful, unpredictable Solo de concours for clarinet and piano have concentrated. But Franck’s winged beast of a piano quintet was the thing: a vehicle for Horton’s supreme feats of virtuosity, exhausting simply to listen to, and the tireless power of the strings (Benjamin Nabarro, Claudia Ajmone-Marsan, violinist Rachel Roberts and cellist Rosefield). It did us good for Fauré’s seemingly free flow: this impassioned outpouring of love for the dedicated Holmès (Ms. Franck was not amused) never repeats itself exactly, yet addresses certain themes and intervals. There was a perfect balance between complexity and pure poetry in Mishka Rushdie Momen’s highly poised piano recital on Thursday morning (Rushdie Momen picture above with Isserlis and Irène Duval). of Mendelssohn Series of variations coruscated in the center, their seamless unfolding. From a program point of view, I would have been inclined to start with the three Rameau pieces so lightly ornamented than with the miraculous Nocturne no. 13 of Fauré and with that of Schumann. Gesänge der Frühe number 1, which, despite its title, feels more like a nighttime piece, suited for 11pm rather than 11am, albeit a very welcome one. Rushdie Momen made a magical avian connection between Schumann’s ‘Prophet Bird’, her fourth choice of forest scenes, and Ravel’s “Oiseaux tristes” from Mirrors. Not deterred by a cell phone adding her voice to her phantasmagorical coda, she went on to give us William Byrd’s. Lachrymae Pavan after Dowland’s ‘Flow, my tears’ – a link to Ades, an ideal encore for which ‘perfect’ is again the only word.

It was quite a day for the seemingly unflappable young pianist. She also shone that evening, the perfect partner for Isserlis in Nadia Boulanger’s very accessible Three Pieces and Debussy’s ever-elusive Cello Sonata; for that you simply need a pianist and cellist who can focus at every moment, and these two absolutely did that. I had also heard an ideal pair, Isserlis and the violinist Irène Duval (image below), play Ravel’s Sonata for Violin and Cello at Fidelio Cafe. Despite Isserls’ amusing distinction between “dog” (“love me”) and “cat” music (“I don’t care if you love me or not”), placing it in the latter category, I adored it then and I was in seventh place. heaven hear him again. Likewise Fauré’s late Piano Trio (the Fidelio pianist was Alasdair Beatson), where you can never understand how the flexible magic is achieved. But the depths were most truly sounded in Isserlis’s trio-piano arrangement of the slow movement from Schumann’s Violin Concerto, an emotion already prepared by his narrative of how he begins with his last melodic inspiration, combined with its treatment in the Variations “The ghost”. – three composed in extreme mental distress, the fourth after Schumann had tried to drown himself in the Rhine. Guess Clara and company tried to stifle the swan songs, and kudos to Isserlis and his team for giving them hallowed space.

There was one more discovery to add to the late Saint-Saens and Schumann sonatas as I heard them. Duval and Isserls began the Friday noon recital with Enescu’s Second Violin Sonata. I knew the third as an infinitely flexible and challenging masterpiece, but I didn’t know that it deserved equal status in a very different style, with Faure’s hints of a unique world full of constant surprises (the voices on another planet that ends the slow motion, the airy but never shallow gimmicks of the finale). Like Rushdie Momen, Duval can unleash a focused ferocity and a wisdom visible well beyond her years.

Perhaps the short Fauré Violin Concerto, in a version with piano rather than orchestra, was bound to feel conventional afterwards, but Duval and Horton held their heads. And the real reason he heard it was the theme the maestro returned to in his final work, the String Quartet that rises and beats against the gates of heaven again and again, the undiminished rapture of the increasingly deaf octogenarian composer and terminally ill, performed with unfailing generosity of spirit by Duval, Ajmone-Marsan, Roberts and Rosefield. What a way to leave the Crucible and head for the train back to London, stepping on air.

Clock The Assassination of the Duke of Guise with Saint-Saëns’ score on YouTube