The Weekly Theme at King's Place is a celebration of the 30th anniversary since the formation of the much acclaimed Endymion ensemble. The celebration takes the shape of a performance marathon by the Endymion ensemble themselves, with music ranging from Mozart to world premieres of music penned by emerging local talent.
I caught up with Endymion last night at 8.45pm for their last two concerts of the day. The first one featured two works for wind ensemble and piano: Mozart's Quintet for winds and piano (not to be confused with the famous Clarinet Quintet) and Poulenc’s Sextet. This concert surely meant to function as a moment's rest between two demanding concerts: a string of birthday homages to Endymion from an array of living British composers and a performance of Birtwistle’26 Orpheus Elegies, also composed for Endymion’s birthday.
Mozart's Quintet is a funny piece: a lesser known number than most of the composer's other chamber music, it has the stately opening of a piece scored for larger forces, with the melodic incipits of piano, clarinet, and oboe regularly stumped out by solemn tutti chords. The strange impression of this beginning was somewhat compounded by slightly faltering synchrony in the tutti entries (the first one in particular). But once the lovely horn entry (beautifully played by Stephen Stirling) melts the majestic tone into lyricism, things got much better.
The first movement has an uncanny way of mimicking the gestures of a piano concerto, opening up solos for the piano at every turn, often turning into the harbinger of new material. So it was just as well that the ensemble found an admirable pianist in Michael Dussek, whose agility and cleanliness of articulation were exquisite. The second movement graced every player with splendid melodic entries, and they all complied very well, although I have a personal favourite in oboist Melinda Maxwell, whose phrases were most able to pierce through the musical fabric and make one hold one's breath.
But the quality of playing was not as high in the last movement, whose playful quality seemed to be somewhat lost on this nonetheless very able ensemble. Much more could have been made of those dynamic contrasts Mozart is so well known for, and although every player performed very ably, that impalpable sense of fun you should get in many of Mozart’s closing Allegretti was not there.
Poulenc's Sextet followed. Poulenc's chamber music bewitches anyone who hears it. The rhythm, the cutting sarcasm, always ensued by the most tender lyrical moments (almost apologies) are a unique concoction you just won’t find anywhere else. The Sextet is a great example of this: moments of boisterous fun (what better way to write for a wind ensemble?), often jazz inflected, melt into song only for the irreverent laughter to bounce right back onto the page.
It is a difficult balance to strike, and one that Endymion only partially achieved. Among the highlights was certainly the second movement (whose neo-classical opening is a wink to the Mozart we just heard). The oboist has many of the lovely melodic entries in this movement, and she used them very well. Yet in the first movement the boisterous opening was unclean, while the mid-movement forlorn bassoon solo—such a desolate call—that announces the new melody in the piano was woefully half-hearted and somewhat clumsily phrased. And I am not sure I can forgive Stephen Stirling—who did play well everywhere else, particularly in the third movement— for ruining the return of the haunting piano melody in the horn at the end of the first movement. Luckily he got it right when the same theme came back to haunt the end of the third movement.
The mini-concert ensuing this was a performance of 26 miniature elegies by Birtwistle, scoring for countertenor (Andrew Watts), Harp (Helen Tunstall) and Oboe (Melinda Maxwell). Oh, and metronomes. Metronomes stand for the mechanical passing of time—clocks, in other words. It is not straightforward quite what relation this bears to Orpheus—is clock-time what this modern Orpheus is trying to undo? Is it responsible for the death of the dancer whose figure haunts Rilke's poetry? Do we really care?
Given that most of the music is instrumental, the imagery is suggested entirely by the programme notes—and really, what with the sung text being in German, the sung part can do little to amend this. It is fair enough that Birtwistle should include a line of a Rilke poem at the end of each of the instrumental miniatures—but do we need a synopsis of the poem from which the line is taken, in order to 'get' the music?
The more you hear the piece the more it is clear that the grand metaphysical claim is unsupported by the music—but only because no music can make such claims, not in the twenty-first century. Sure, the initial sonnet traces the birth of music (this is quite a common modernist gesture) by giving us rhythm, then melody, then harmony. Yet all that is discernible in the ensuing flow of miniatures is an alternation of rhythmic, slightly manic music (surely signifying the machine, clocks, ‘real time’) and a slightly insipid lyricism, left to the oboe and countertenor. All ably scored but not striking in the least. It is a pity, because some of the imagery—those that are translatable into music, such as the image of the ticking clock, or the dancer, had enormous potential.
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