This was a concert of classical chamber music. It wasn’t a rave. Pity. The temptation to leap out of your seat and start wildly dancing was, at least in two of the three pieces played, well-nigh irresistible. If Ensemble 360 had intended to set this joint a’jumping, then on the night in question it was definitely a case of Job Done.
Prokofiev’s rather solemnly entitled Overture on Hebrew Themes was the only work in which all six members of this group were playing together. But this is very far from being a solemn piece of music. What lies behind it is that wonderful Eastern European tradition of cheerful Jewish dance music known as ‘klezmer’.
“And all the instrumentalists managed to conjure up that infectious outdoors feeling of gleeful, sometimes almost manic festive celebration. Robert Plane skirling and bubbling away on clarinet was by turns incantatory, melancholy or triumphant, and the string players with their dry and savage pizzicato accompaniment provided a powerful rhythmic pulse, as did Tim Horton on piano.”
Then came that sublime tribute to Mozart’s virtuoso clarinettist friend Anton Stadler, the Clarinet Quintet, K581, one of the most moving works ever written for the instrument.
“Another concert-goer remarked to me during the interval that he’d never heard a soloist who so successfully managed to combine joy, serenity and wistful introspection as did Robert Plane.”
It’s a quintessentially elegant and graceful work, and the five members of Ensemble 360 fully did it justice. The poignant Larghetto soared and blossomed; the Menuetto was appropriately brisk and sunny; and the mischievous Allegretto managed to pull magically inventive Variation after Variation out of Mozart’s tricorn hat.
After the Interval, as Robert Plane took a well-earned rest, the audience was treated to that ever-fresh and vibrant masterpiece, the [Schumann] Piano Quintet, Op. 44… In the first movement the confident and extrovert Florestan leads to begin with, but the more dreamy and introspective Eusebius keeps on applying a check on his partner’s ebullience. Next come the somewhat bleak and even perhaps a little uncanny ‘In modo d’una Marcia’ movement… Ensemble 360 certainly emphasized the darkness lying at its core…
“Tim Horton revelled in the ascending and descending scales of the Scherzo that follows, and the whole ensemble rose to each successive climax with admirable energy and conviction.”
The final movement, with Beethovenian exuberance, brought the concert to an exhilarating end, and the applause that followed (with even some slightly alarming stamping of feet on the Assembly Room’s venerable wooden floor) was deafening.
…
