For this last concert of the season, an understated but champagne cork-popping line-up of the rare and the dazzling, the artistic director Jonathan Morton stood aside for guest leader Anthony Marwood.
Mendelssohn’s String Symphony No 13 in C Minor, one of a flurry written before he was 15, hardly deserves the label “early work”, so precocious is his talent and this well-shaped performance gave it its best showing. Aggressively incisive and stylised in the opening broken rhythms, Marwood and co were breathtakingly zippy in the fugue — if a little exposed at times — channelling the verve of youth with the sobriety of experience.
Another little-heard gem to follow: American composer Morton Gould’s hugely enjoyable Stringmusic won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1995. It’s an immaculately structured piece that trips fluidly from Shostakovich to American folk via a teasingly ambiguous aesthetic that could be Midwest plains or Russian steppe.
Each movement is a polished vignette. The spare double bass-led Dirge struggles internally between earthbound bass and heavenly violin chords, and the final Strum resolves folk inflections into a brilliant fiddle-fest.
Tantalising but far too brief, the second half comprised the first UK performance of Orlando Jopling’s arrangement for violin and strings of Schumann’s Cello Concerto. It’s not without precedent — Schumann, desperately trying to drum up interest, had done something similar in the 1850s. Jopling’s neat string ensemble reduction is a wonderfully balanced thing, retaining the interplay of Schumann’s orchestration. But the violin, soaring above the Ensemble, egotistical, brilliant, is a very different beast to the absent cello it doubles.
Advertisement
Marwood is certainly the man for the job, his violin singing. Striking too, is the way the assembled strings punch way above their weight, not a large ensemble but a small orchestra. A clever translation, yes, but the plaudits go to the Ensemble.