Brighton Philharmonic Chamber Ensemble. Strings Attached Attenborough Centre, University of Sussex, Brighton 19th March 2023

Joanna MacGregor.jpeg

Coffee concerts are a highly civilised concept especially on a Sunday morning. And this last in the current Strings Attached season was enjoyable, not least because it was the first such concert I’ve managed to get to since the pandemic.

Joanna MacGregor, Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra’s artistic director, had teamed up with BPO leader Ruth Rogers and three other principal players. for this concert – the high point of which was all five of them on stage for Elgar’s Piano Quintet in A Minor Op 84 which dates from 1918.

In the opening movement they found an intriguing contrast between Elgarian “noblimente” and passages of witty lightness. This ensemble does plaintive very well and there was lots of palpable intercommunication in the adagio. Caroline Harrison is a strikingly expressive viola player and she gets lots of solo lead opportunities in this programme. It’s a joy, too, to see cellist Katherine Jenkinson actually grinning with pleasure during a particularly tasty duet passage with Harrison in the final movement.

The concert began with Two Pieces for String Quartet by Rebecca Clarke – more scope for Harrison because Clarke’s own instrument was viola so naturally it features prominently here. These lush, lyrical pieces, written just six years after the Elgar were a treat to hear because they were new to me. And I was especially interested because I recently read (and reviewed here) Leah Broad’s excellent book Quartet, which presents Clarke as one of four key women who changed the face of British classical music. The BPO Chamber Ensemble played them with plenty of warmth.

The second work in the first half was Faure’s 1879 Piano Quartet No 1. Joanna MacGregor, as ever, brings oodles of stage presence and earns my admiration for having enough tech-savvy confidence to play off an iPad at a public concert. Rather her than me! The ensemble found plenty of French romanatic passion in this work especially in the substantial first movement with its thick opening chords. And I really liked their account of the witty scherzo with all that light-as-a-feather pizzicato over rippling piano. Dynamic control and (I presume) assiduous counting gave us a pleasing adagio followed by a dramatic high speed lilt in the last movement. Ruth Rogers is a fascinating player to watch. It’s not the first time I’ve been struck by the expressive way she moves her body round the violin rather than the other way round. And it’s good to hear Nicky Sweeney’s excellent second violin with a clear voice of its own but also beautifully balanced.

One final point: I really don’t like the new (ish) habit of trying to give concerts titles as if they were art exhibitions or novels. It’s fatuous and contrived. This one was pointlessly called “English Landscapes” which ignored the fact that over a third of the programme was French.

Susan Elkin