Coffee Concerts

Coffee Concert: Britten Oboe Quartet – Nicholas Daniel (oboe, cor anglais), Jacqueline Shave (violin), Clare Finnimore (viola), Caroline Dearnley (cello) – at Brighton Corn Exchange, Sunday February 22 at 11am.

Elgar, Andante & Allegro; Knussen, Cantata for oboe & string trio; Mozart, Adagio for cor anglais & string trio K580a; Britten, Phantasy for oboe & string trio in F minor Op 2; interval; Lutyens, Oboe quartet, O Absalom; L.Berkeley, String Trio Op 19; Mozart, Oboe Quartet in K K370.

A Coffee Concert star born by lunchtime. Not over a few appearances, but in just a couple of hours. That was Britain’s favourite oboist Nicholas Daniel. His rapport with his audience as spokesman for his ensemble and its music and his instrument, was sheer joy. Lots of interesting information, advice, signposting, musical stories and jokes of human appeal, and a sense of humour, wit and willing self-deprecation.

Almost anti-star, with a sloppy, V-necked white T-shirt (‘Armani Exchange’) he might earlier have worn out of the shower to cook the breakfast in, now peering out from a sober dark suit. But a positive superstar with his wonderfully supple, flexible tone and the Daniel sound one longs to hear in praise of this instrument as an expressive match for its other apparently more versatile woodwind counterparts.

On behalf of certain 20th Century repertoire being played here, particularly Oliver Knussen and Elisabeth Lutyens pieces from 1977, Daniel was a spokesman needing to be an ambassador. But such is this Brighton Coffee Concert audience that almost anyone fearing they might have needed sugar with the medicine would have gladly submitted to the experience and challenges Daniel, Shave, Finnimore and Dearnley laid before them.

Once again, it’s that advantage which performance set ‘in the round’ gives performers and listeners alike. The skills, tests and stresses for the musicians in both these demanding composers’ works was palpable from all 360 degree viewing angles. And that close-up experience brought everything alive which on record or radio can so easily otherwise sound impersonal and imposing.

Speaking to me later, Daniel indicated how rewarded his ensemble had felt at the softness and fertility of the soil awaiting their seeds. And he told the audience in the round how nice he found it to see his friends, the other musicians, playing their instruments with people behind them.

This hugely receptive Brighton audience must make musicians at 11am wonder if they are still in bed, dreaming. It wants to learn, it wants to encounter new experiences. It has had its perception of chamber music widened by Chris Darwin’s ‘Origins of the Pieces’ programme notes , and its taste catholicised over the years by outstanding ensembles who now realise they are less box-office hidebound in what to play. The audience now sense when a risk is being taken and they will don the crash helmet and climb onto the pillion seat for the ride.

The Britten Oboe Quartet, an offshoot from the Britten Sinfonia. Britten is increasingly in this audience’s veins and his Phantasy hit the spot as it completed a first-half musical exploration that juxtaposed an early Elgar piece (of youthful intensity, then waltzing chattiness), and a Mozart rarity for cor anglais (ending in a gorgeous smile), with Knussen’s meticulously drawn Cantata of inventive, imagination-provoking textures and atmospheres.

Daniel warned that the Lutyens to begin the second half was best-placed there for an audience able to galvanise itself during the interval. Horror film score composition was Lutyens’ day job but here, from alcohol-fuelled evening composition, said Daniel, came O Absalom, another 12-tone insistence from 1977, this time dedicated to her mentally-stricken sister and written for Daniel’s teacher Janet Craxton. Cor anglais reappeared, and hardly an audience member moved during the piece’s entirety.

Daniel left the stage for the ladies to show their close-woven ensemble in the 1943 String Trio by the much more easily-assimilated Lennox Berkeley. This prepared everyone for the dessert, the piece most in the audience will have known, the one which ostensibly gave birth to the oboe quartet as a musical entity – the Quartet by Mozart. Taking us back two centuries, placed last on the programme, the performance came hewn from and invigorated by the rigours and angularity of what music the Britten Oboe Quartet had played already that morning.

More introductory words from Daniel, bringing chuckles about the bars in the finale designed to make the soloist sweat and go slightly nuts. And probably still the most perfect piece in the repertoire, given an extra fizz this day, brought our adventure in Daniel’s den of delights to a close ― and to cheers from the audience.

Yes, cheers. What had looked the least tempting programme of music in this season’s series had delivered something special. And the Coffee Concerts had seen its latest new star born.

Concluding this season is another rare chance to hear live in performance a big and great work for unusual forces, made programmable by enlisting senior musicians from a study situation. The Royal College of Music Wind Ensemble will play Mozart’s Gran Partita, alias his 10th Serenade, for 13 wind instruments in Bb K 361.

If you’ve forgotten the source of the Adagio that in ‘Amadeus’ stopped Salieri in his tracks, rendering him impotent as a composer, this is it. Be there on Sunday March 15 at 11am and be similarly flabbergasted by beauty. Be ready for 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 basset horns, 2 bassoons, 1 double bassoon and 4 horns. They are your lucky 13.

My favourite cricket matches are those where I have no expectation that England will win, but they do, using intelligence, skill and courage against a technically superior side. It’s not a feeling I’ve had for a while, but I had it this morning in another context.

I love the sound of the oboe but I have problems with an oboe quartet: the repertoire is limited and the oboe sound is so strong and rounded that strings can sound quite thin and underpowered beside it. But my low expectations were confounded this morning; the programme was rich and varied and the playing of the Britten Oboe Quartet was a wonder of interweaving textures and perfect balance.

They started with the weakest piece: Elgar’s early Andante and Allegro for oboe and string trio. The Andante is banal, or at least sentimental, though the Allegro has rather more life. But the 21 year old Elgar had clearly thought about the problem of balancing oboe and strings. In the Andante the oboe has a slow melodic part, at times dueting with the other sonorous instrument – the cello, balanced by a fast unremitting accompaniment in the violin. It was fine as an introduction to the players, especially when it was followed by Oliver Knussen’s Cantata for oboe and string trio.

The Cantata is a wonderful piece. Knussen said it “should sound like a disembodied lullaby”. Everyone I spoke to had a different reaction. I didn’t hear any lullaby in it, but rather an abstract work that was both edgy and lyrical, delicate and frenetic, sometimes all in the same bar. Part of the thrill of it came from the absence of those things the listener usually clings to, like some idea of where the first beat of the bar is. The score has bar lines but they aren’t apparent to the listener. Nicholas Daniel told us before they started that at times he and the trio are playing at different speeds. At one point his part abandons musical notation and stops him playing for “one second”. You absolutely had to be there to take in what was happening: to see the players handing over momentum to each other, to see how Knussen achieves those sounds. At one point there is a held high note of unearthly beauty that only reveals itself as oboe and violin in unison when they slowly peal away from each other.

Mozart’s short Adagio for cor anglais and string trio was an early version of his Ave verum corpus – a perfect little gem. I couldn’t think how the string players had altered their sound from the bright tones of the Knussen to this mellow bliss – until I spotted that they played the whole piece muted.

Britten’s Phantasy for oboe and string trio in F minor was another early work, full of lyricism and energy. It sounded quite conventional after the Knussen but it’s already clearly Britten. He copes with the problem of the overpowering oboe by giving the strings much more to do. At one point he even shuts the oboe up completely for five minutes.

The second half ended with the Mozart oboe quartet, played with all the delicacy, sparkle and expression you could want, preceded by Lennox Berkeley’s string trio op. 19, a substantial work, tuneful and rhythmical, that would have sounded modern if it had not been preceded by the work that, with the Knussen, was a high point of the concert for me: Elizabeth Lutyens’ O Absalom. It consists of fragments of sound, handed from one instrument to another, with a pause between each fragment, so that there is no sense of progression, and certainly no tunes and no sustained rhythms, just a stark unbearable beauty. In the score the top line is the violin, the oboe coming second, above viola and cello. All expectations are overturned by writing, and playing, of intelligence, skill and courage.

Which brings me to the performers. I’ve heard them before but today they seemed to reach a peak of performance that could not be bettered. Nicholas Daniel’s oboe was as expressive as ever but with a rounded mellow tone that he maintained through all dynamics and all volumes. His high piano was exquisite; more than anything else it ensured the moulding of strings and oboe into one. The string playing too was expressive, each player with an individual character which was then merged into ensemble playing of the highest quality. Daniel spoke about each piece with affection and love. Before the final Mozart he said something about how comfortable he felt in the setting of our Corn Exchange with the audience in the round and so close. They had taken us through an ambitious and difficult programme, and, as Daniel could see from the faces around him, we had been with them every step of the way.

Andrew Polmear
22 February 2015

Coffee Concert at Brighton Dome / Corn Exchange, Sunday January 18 at 11am. Heath Quartet: Oliver Heath, Cerys Jones (violins), Gary Pomeroy (viola), Christopher Murray (cello). Wolf, Italian Serenade; Bartok, String Quartet No 1 Opus 7; Beethoven, String Quartet No 14 in C# minor Opus 131.

They being among the youngest people in the Corn Exchange whenever they return to give these Coffee Concerts, Heath Quartet are logically recognisable as though the sons and daughter of this remarkable audience. In the years since their Brighton Dome residency, the Heaths have made several contributions to this richly maturing series of chamber music concerts, each distinguishable by the inclusion of a strong 20th century string quartet.

The previous two have been by Britten and Tippett and both left the listeners hugely enlightened and impressed by music many had not heard before. Now the Heaths came with Bartok, who, though mainstream 20th Century in this repertoire, constitutes a risk and is rarely chosen for performance at the Coffee Concerts.

So lovingly are the Heath now anticipated here that hearts and ears were open to hearing Bartok No 1 in complete confidence. Not only testament to that affection and admiration, but in tribute to the quality of this audience, which must be among the best of its kind in the country, Heath gave a programme that would not have drawn in many other public places the 200-plus who filled most of the seats.

Opening the morning as an apparently cheery greeting and opening to an essentially serious programme, even the humour amid the dynamically extrovert Italian Serenade by songsmith Hugo Wolf was shadily ironical and even sarcastic. But the delivery by Heath was palpably complete in its integrity and the flow into the Bartok was no sudden jerk or scare.

Always of such experienced and entertaining assistance are the Coffee Concert programme notes which I now hereby brand as ‘Chris Darwin’s Origins of the Pieces’. We often hear of great works composed for performers who then shun it on musical grounds. Usually, the composer got on with finding someone else to give the premiere. But here was a different story.

Darwin tells us that Bartok had a violin concerto ready for the love of his life to play. Girl ‘dumped’ boy. Boy (27), devastated, instead poured his feelings into the first of a series of string quartets out of Hungary that prickled the world of that genre. The unlyrical prickling still goes on but this intently-listening, committed, indeed relishing audience had no problems.

Bartok’s self-confessed opening funeral dirge found the Heaths conveying raw, agonised longing and regret, culminating audibly in a wringing out of the final drops of pain. Then came a forward-running momentum which, though seemingly back to life and reality, had the Heaths raging as though in grim reluctance to rejoin the race. The finale, like a dance with gritted teeth, containing possibly a softening smile proposed by the viola, ultimately in vain, had jaggedness and cragginess the Heaths superbly delivered.

While some of us go to the gym, pump iron, ride bikes or run a distance. Instead, the Heaths sometimes play music like this. Sunday morning or not, it was all action for them, with the cello bass felt through the floor and up the listeners’ feet, and even Oliver Heath drawn into the physical battle. He usually sits very still with mainly static feet and lets his lead fiddle do all the talking and responding to the score.

Violist Gary Pomeroy is similarly still, trunk down, but watch for his frequent smiles and turns of dark eyes to the others, enquiring or warmly confirmatory by turns. Like Oliver Heath, he had to break some sweat in this one. There’s nothing like violins to see musicians physically animated from top to toe. Second violin Cerys Jones’ face reveals the most of the four and she and cellist Christopher Murray get through the most physical work.

The reward, and a testing one still, was to play and to hear Beethoven’s Opus 131. In chamber music, this is among his late quartets and the second of his final three. These quartets take music beyond our existence. And remember the number 131 because Beethoven, the best qualified to say so, his judgment based on its extra imaginative content, rated it his best. Many would say that this verdict automatically places it above all others ever written.

There are seven movements for the price of four and a bonus extra scherzo. And it’s a free ticket into the unknown. Beethoven was deeply unwell, long stone-deaf, and tormented by a recalcitrant, feckless nephew forced into his care. But the music just kept coming.

And today, the Heath just keep coming, too, better, and better still. There was no encore necessary to programme, nor one to be justifiably demanded by an audience once again left in wonder at the quality of performance at these Coffee Concerts, which are heard in ideal in-the-round format. Who needs celebrated quartets at The (conventionally laid-out) Wigmore Hall when this more intimate and satisfying experience lies on your doorstep?

Richard Amey