London,

Hebrides Ensemble

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Stationer's Hall
EC4,

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Herbides Ensmeble takes no prisoners

 

Hebrides Ensemble: Scotland's foremost chamber group

Musicians have to work hard to compete with the renaissance splendour of Stationers’ Hall but nobody could accuse the Hebrides Ensemble of not giving it its best shot.

The Hall is one of the semi-secret venues unveiled by the City of London Festival, and this concert embodied one of the festival’s themes: the 60th parallel north, the line of latitude linking the northern tip of Scotland to the Baltic States and Russia.

Building a programme around such an imaginary thread is a nice conceit, and it seems churlish to complain that, if anything, it gave the concert too much coherence.

Or was that a result of the doleful melancholy that coursed through every piece?

Nothing wrong with a bit of melancholy, of course, and the players’ full-frontal attack certainly took no prisoners.

They went so far as to stretch the line of latitude to embrace Iceland.

I’ve no idea how authentic Haflidi Hallgrimsson’s Icelandic Folksongs for cello and piano are, but two of them sounded reminiscent of those distinctly un-Icelandic hits, English Country Garden and Scarborough Fair.

Hallgrimsson relished the opportunity to be tuneful but his inventiveness eventually wore thin.

Judith Weir’s Distance and Enchantment was both playful and eerie, a miniature piano concerto that would make the perfect accompaniment to a silent horror movie, while Sibelius’s early String Trio had an ample supply of the kind of big-boned melody that is the composer’s trademark but without the muscular development that makes his best pieces so overwhelming.

Peter Maxwell Davies earned his place by virtue of his status as an honorary Man of Orkney, and his String Trio, receiving its London premiere, proved to be typically knotty and argumentative.

The keening of the Orkney fiddle was a ghostly presence throughout, eventually coming to the fore in the mournful violin lines that brought the piece to a climax.

James MacMillan’s Kiss on Wood added a note of anger to proceedings but Elegy hardly found Stravinsky at his most boisterous, although that was no fault of soloist Catherine Marwood.

Her performance brought a moment of exquisite serendipity: as the final notes died away, a nearby church rang nine o’clock, the tolling sounding for all the world like a funeral bell.

It was left to Shostakovich’s String Trio to bring gallows humour to the party.

The piece drinks from the same deep well of melancholy as the rest of the programme, but its moments of savage, drunken irony brought welcome contrast.

The Hebrides Ensemble played it as if it was a matter of life and death.

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