Kings Place has now been open for four years, so this was the fifth festival in which 100+ concerts take place over a long weekend. It is an imaginative, ambitious idea, but one that rewards creative programming, for each concert offers 45 minutes of repertoire – but often the artists extend these to take in two or three recitals.
On the Friday afternoon The London Sinfonietta used these possibilities to the maximum with an intelligent link between two concerts of short and lively works for solo instrument, ending each with a masterpiece for clarinet, violin and piano – not the primary combination of 20th century chamber music but one which proved highly effective.
It helps to have artists of the calibre of clarinettist Mark van de Wiel, violinist Jonathan Morton – newly announced as the Sinfonietta's principal violin – and pianist John Constable, an ever-present on the ensemble’s roll call since they were formed in 1968. Each performer had a hand in the introduction of the pieces they were about to play, which helped immensely with works not often heard. We learned that the first of Simon Holt's Brief Candles, for solo clarinet, was written for his bank manager – but not played. Van de Wiel's command of the clarinet here was total, and the third piece – art project – took the instrument to the borders of inaudibility, the sound literally coming in from nothing but maintaining an incredibly quiet dynamic throughout.
Constable joined the action for a spiky performance of Lutoslawski's Dance Preludes, which served both to highlight the composer’s melodic craft but also to whet the appetite for his forthcoming centenary year. Morton was then added for Bartók's Contrasts, where the three performers kept an impressively high level of tension through the slow movement, seemingly suspended in space, but also in the more raucous ensemble passages. This was music of grit and determination, but also with a jazzy swing, the wishes of clarinettist Benny Goodman taken in to account and freely expressed here by van de Wiel.
The second concert began with the clarinet once more, though this was one of the first compositions for the instrument alone, Stravinsky's 3 Pieces. Students of the instrument know that these are something of a Mount Everest, but van de Wiel's technique was beyond reproach, his tonal quality exquisite in the quieter parts of the first piece, but with an impressive penetration in the third.
Morton then gave us the strangely moving Secret Psalm of Oliver Knussen, the piece dedicated to the memory of the London Sinfonietta's former artistic director, Michael Vyner. The secret is held in the piece's frequent references to and quotations from one of Vyner’s favourite violin concertos, but Knussen somehow disguises these lingering glances, with none of them obvious. My guess was that the concerto was by Sibelius, but the privacy of the dedication and the musical workings was reflected in the intimate nature of the piece, the legato notes in particular beautifully played by Morton.
There was little room for lyricism in the closing piece, the suite from Stravinsky's musical theatre piece The Soldier's Tale. The acoustics of Hall 2 at Kings Place came in to their own here, the dry sound ideal for the scratchy sound of the double stopped violin used almost entirely for rhythmic purposes. That, combined with the punchy clarinet and often caustic piano chords, made for a performance of grit and determination, though the dance of the devil at the end, celebrating his duping of a soldier in to selling his soul, still managed to have a smile on its face.
Top class performances all – and an auspicious start to a festival that is starting to establish itself firmly in the concert calendar. It deserves its place, for there is nothing else like it in the musical year – and to be able to say it was well worth taking a half day from work for it tells you all you need to know!
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