Bachtrack, Phil Parker
Four Stars

It’s difficult sometimes to know what will motivate concertgoers to attend particular events. This brilliantly vivid programme contained three absolute classics of the 20th century wind quintet repertoire…  The wind quintet back catalogue is substantially made up of lighter fare, reflecting the wind ensemble’s roots in serenades and divertimenti, but here Nielsen, Barber and Ligeti each showed that writing for these forces is no bar to musical greatness.

To start at the end of the evening, Nielsen’s Wind Quintet, Op.43, is generally acknowledged as the finest such piece in existence; it was given a performance here that underscored that view. Generally it’s the final movement that catches the ear, with its variations that exploit the different characters of the five instruments – and of the Danish performers for whom Nielsen wrote the piece – and that was broadly the case here, particularly the “suave” oboe playing (Nielsen’s word for his first oboist) of Adrian Wilson. But the middle-movement Menuet was particularly fine, given with a depth to the elegance that revealed the music as more than just neo-Classical pastiche.

Barber’s Summer Music closed the first half of the concert in a dreamy soundscape that belied the fact that it was his first composition for a wind ensemble.

“Once again Wilson’s oboe got the work’s singing lines, but the lazy horn and bassoon melody at the start – Naomi Atherton’s horn lyrical and secure here, as throughout the evening – was notably evocative. The rapid, chattering semiquaver passage that follows showed the ensemble’s precise rhythmic attack to good effect.”

That tautness – and the fleetness of foot to negotiate rapid changes of rhythm and texture – was even more compellingly in evidence in the work that came between the Barber and Nielsen pieces, Ligeti’s 6 Bagatelles. Ligeti the composer was fond of playing musical games and setting himself creative challenges, as Wilson explained in introducing this piece, but whether one responded to the work’s mathematical ingenuity or simply to its extraordinary imagination and wit, the performance showcased individual and collective musicianship of a high order.

The Adagio fifth movement revealed Ligeti’s debt to Bartók, particularly his “night music”, and it was given a sombre treatment here, offset by just the right amount of rustling of nocturnal creatures in the undergrowth… However, for me at least, the Cantabile, molto legato third movement summed up what these musicians did best.

“Juliet Bausor’s expansive, lyrical flute melody captured just the right degree of serenity, while beneath it Robert Plane’s clarinet and guest Ursula Leveaux’s bassoon skittered like agitated insects.”

The programme opened with the most recent work of the evening, Sally Beamish’s The Naming of Birds. Here each member of the ensemble had his or her own individual work-out as one (or, in Bausor’s case, two) of the birds in question… And, as a kind of palate cleanser between the Beamish and Barber, the players gave us a late work by Zemlinsky, setting aside his modernist position between Mahler and Schoenberg and taking us back to the wind music of a bygone age. His brief, slightly sentimental Humoresque was played with insouciant charm.