How many distinguished contemporary British composers can you fit into one room? Tuesday’s Nash Ensemble concert of new or recently commissioned pieces didn’t, I think, break the world record. But it was still an event to find Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle and Alexander Goehr, the three composers and former fellow students once tagged as “the Manchester school”, breathing the same air, along with Colin Matthews. If the other featured composers had turned up — Jonathan Harvey and Mark-Anthony Turnage — we’d have had a double hat-trick.
All are establishment figures, regularly sought out and performed; the Nash Ensemble doesn’t often go on a limb. Not that we had easy listening. The wildest, most baffling music came from Maxwell Davies’s The Last Island, a string sextet crammed with diverse sounds inspired by the scenery and birdlife of an Orkney island but twisted through the mathematical permutations of “a ninefold lunar magic square”, as the composer’s note explained. Matters were more straightforward in Turnage’s sextet Returning, darkly expressive, and Goehr’s quintet for four strings and clarinet (Richard Hosford): music of tightly-knit counterpoint, meaty and pungent, distantly inspired by 15th-century polyphony.
Another North Sea island appeared in Matthews’s The Island. On first acquaintance, these Rilke settings hadn’t impressed me, but they found a new strength and purpose with Claire Booth’s radiant soprano, floating over an ensemble so muffled that the musicians seemed underwater. Booth also lent lustre to Harvey’s 1985 Song Offerings: four Tagore settings, spiritual love songs requiring high-flying vocal gymnastics and instrumental playing with a fluorescent glow. With Tuesday’s star forces, none of that was a problem.
The Nash musicians were equally prepared for the grit of the concert’s one world premiere, Birtwistle’s Nash commission Fantasia Upon All the Notes, dedicated “in sorrow and anger” to Tony Fell, his former publisher at Boosey and Hawkes, who died during its composition. In the opening bars, Philippa Davies’s limpid flute briefly suggested something emollient. But the Birtwistle tiger soon leapt out, enlisting even the shifting modes of the rippling harp in the tortured harmonic crunches and scurrying textures. A sharp new piece, well worth having.