Tenderness to passion to serenity

25 May 26

Closing this year’s Sheffield Chamber Music Festival, curator and soprano Claire Booth mused aloud on the place of words and the human voice in a medium usually seen as a ‘pure’ instrumental domain. This closing concert, bookended by sublime autumnal masterpieces by Richard Strauss, also explored music without words by an operatic composer, Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, and the only Sibelius tone poem that doesn’t have a written narrative as its starting point, En Saga. If ultimately the evening’s experience felt almost overwhelming, that might also have had something to do with an expanded Ensemble 360 pushing against the physical constraints of the Crucible Playhouse as a venue for chamber music, however one ends up defining it.

… En Saga, here “reverse engineered” by American musicologist Gregory Barrett from Sibelius’ 1892 orchestral version into a hypothetical septet for five strings plus flute and clarinet, a student work for which no original manuscript source exists but which formed the basis for En Saga as we now know it. The composition has no ‘story’… but plenty of atmosphere.

“Juliette Bausor and Robert Plane dealt adeptly with the prominent flute and clarinet parts, and the other players wrestled heroically with Sibelius’ anguished and intense string writing…”

Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll was originally composed for just 13 players… Ensemble 360 tinkered a little with the scoring (sidestepping the brief trumpet part at the climax), but offered a lush and intimate performance, notably from the five wind players, including Ensemble 360’s latest recruit Jonathan Davies on bassoon, filling at last a lengthy vacancy.

The concert ended with Strauss’ Four Last Songs, in a chamber version scored by Australian composer James Ledger… there were moments of fragile beauty, in particular the nostalgic horn melody at the end of September and the two flutes – actually here flute and clarinet – as larks disappearing into the dying sunset at the close of Im Abendrot.

At the other end of the evening, we had a new work, Fallen, Felled by young collaborative composer Ellen Sargen, a brief meditation on ecological despair and possible consolation, in which Booth declaimed the occasionally cataclysmic text, and before that the exquisite string sextet that opens Strauss’ opera Capriccio.