It used to be the case that if classical performers wanted to fill an auditorium, programming music by Beethoven or Tchaikovsky would do the trick. These days the ‘Vaughan Williams effect’ appears to be a persuasive strategy. How else to explain the Crucible Playhouse packed to the rafters for a concert of otherwise relatively obscure string or oboe quartet music that would presumably have been unknown to most of the audience? But The Lark Ascending generates an almost Pavlovian reaction: audiences just can’t get enough of it. Sheltering under its wing, as it were, Ensemble 360’s string players and oboist Adrian Wilson brought blinking into the spotlight three works inspired by the Cobbett Prize (the English industrialist Walter Willson Cobbett’s award for the composition of ‘Phantasies’ in the vein of Purcell and his 17th-century ilk), not to mention a ‘Yorkshire premiere’ of a 2016 piece by Charlotte Bray.
“… Ensemble 360’s rapt and emotionally sensitive performances brought out both similarities and differences.”
… Wilson played the oboe part [of Britten’s Phantasy Quartet] with deftness and vigour, his fellow performers responding to the shifts in mood and texture with intuitive skill. What all three works showed was just how much wonderful music we rarely get to hear in concert. After the Holst, second violin Claudia Ajmone-Marsan observed that the work was new to all the players, but would now be programmed more often. Their enthusiasm was shared audibly by those looking on.
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Which just left Vaughan Williams to close the concert, The Lark Ascending appearing in the slightly unusual guise of a recent arrangement for string quartet by Martin Gerigk. Benjamin Nabarro was in astonishing form, his violin singing sweetly, the flights of fancy leaving the audience in stunned admiration as the wisps of sound floated away into the blue distance. It should be said that the other three players shouldered the ‘orchestral’ burden impressively, bringing out harmonies often lost in the work’s more familiar guise, but the end of the concert belonged to Nabarro, as testified by the foot-stomping ovation.
