Robin Holloway’s new piece, Five Temperaments, is the epitome of chamber music. It’s an intelligent interplay of sophisticated ideas, in which the five wind players seem to converse and take on personalities like characters in one of those quick-witted plays by Tom Stoppard or Alan Bennett. And it’s also the epitome of Robin Holloway, the most shrinking of shrinking violets, who has nevertheless produced sheaves of beautifully fashioned music in a career stretching back to 1970.
As befits a Cambridge professor of composition, his work is grounded in a profound understanding of older music. Holloway’s first love is the Romantics. You can hear that in his fondness for sepia-tinted lyricism, ripe but never clogged harmonies and twilight moods.
But in Five Temperaments there’s a much older influence at work: the fiendishly clever isorhythmic motets concocted by medieval composers such as Machaut and Dufay, in which the same theme will be layered on top of itself in several different time values.
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In Holloway’s hands, this device is no mere academic exercise. It helps him to construct highly dramatic structures - each with an illusion of acceleration and then withdrawal - while allowing what is recognisably the same melodic contour to bind the music cogently together.
But that’s merely to speak of the nuts and bolts. Underpinning all this is an emotional journey. The “five temperaments” of the title clearly refer not only to the five instrumentalists, but also to the five little movements that whisk us through a kaleidoscope of moods, mostly on the melancholic side, in barely ten minutes.
As with everything Holloway writes, there are more exquisite nuances here than big, bold statements. And his own temperament dictates that he ends not with a bang but a whimper. Nine composers out of ten would have made a finale out of his jazzy, mercurial penultimate movement.
But how good that, in this noisy new century, composers are still producing works of such subtle, understated content and impeccable craftsmanship. It was superbly played by members of the Britten Sinfonia, who earlier - joined by Imogen Cooper - had given a polished account of Beethoven’s early E-flat Quintet for Piano and Wind.