As part of Music in the Round’s exciting autumn season Ensemble 360 was joined tonight by Chris Addison, writer, actor, director and comedian, widely known for TV sit-com The Thick Of It and as a panelist on Mock the Week and an also occasionally spotted guest-prom-hosting with Katie Derham at the Albert Hall. Combining his enthusiasms, informally dressed, bespectacled Addison paced the Crucible stage to host an Incomplete Guide to Chamber Music, his initial nervy delivery gradually calming.
Served up in splendid snatches and excerpts, a pick ‘n’ mix selection box of tasty musical treats was on offer tonight, designed to delight novice newcomers to chamber music and old-hand old-comers alike with pieces famously familiar and others excitingly less well-known, penned by a dozen plus deliciously diverse composers. In fast-forward flits the sparkling musicianship of Ensemble 360 took us from Europe’s seventeenth century to the present day, travelling from Corelli to Meredith via assorted solos, trios, quartets, quintets and yes, yes, nonets.
Just as Ensemble 360’s members do, Addison interspersed music with informal gobbets of fact, anecdote, opinion and the odd joke, taking us from times when compositions followed orderly rules and patterns and instruments were limited in number and musical capacity, on through various technical and mechanical advances, and right up to modern, no holds barred/anything goes approaches – sometimes with digital, electronic knobs on. Corelli’s string trio (plus harpsichord) demonstrated how cello and bass merely had pedestrian walking parts whereas Haydn’s string quartet got them strutting their stuff more fully, even throwing in drones (musical, not military). The hugely prolific Italian composer Barabara Strozzi showed what scintillating musical miracles an unsupported, seventeenth-century single mother could perform, while Bach (JS) and son (CPE) each brought different delights before Mozart indulged his passion for the latest invention of his day – the clarinet – to bowl us over with his Kegelstatt trio. It was then up to Beethoven to close the first half with a bit of classy piano and wind quintet.
Things grew increasingly full-on as Romantic headed towards electronic in the second half. First, the heavenly beauty of a Chopin nocturne on a piano blessed with felts that temper the harsher percussive impacts of hammers on strings, impossible in earlier eras; next, the divine, floaty-flute magic of Debussy’s impressionistic Syrinx. Then, after glorious scherzo music from Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who struggled with the twin disadvantages of being black and, as Chris added, from Croydon, came a captivating piece from another impossibly prolific female composer, the British suffragette Ethel Smythe before Shostakovich rent the air with a fabulous despair of angry strings by way of a suicide note to the Soviets. Casting aside further music norms, Ligeti thrilled ears and hearts with his exhilarating, innovative avant-garde sounds before Steve Reich’s 12-track sounds of New York brought the reverberating wonders of a live clarinettist playing with himself, integrating a single, live part with ten pre-recorded parts. Always a stunner. Ear-pieces inserted, the players’ finale blew everyone away with the rich excitement and loud exhilaration of genre-fluid, EDM-loving Anna Meredith (that’s electronic dance music), leaving part of Chris Addison’s beloved Dvorak second piano quintet to round off an evening that surely had something memorable and mesmerising for everyone, the special joys of each piece, each instrument and all combinations thereof, superbly conveyed by Ensemble 360.
Eileen Caiger Gray
