Business as usual: Ensemble intercontemporain at the Wigmore Hall
Debussy's Première rapsodie for clarinet and piano, Maderna's Viola, Messiaen's Le merle noir for flute and piano, Schoeller's Madrigal for piano quintet, Berio's Sequenza I for solo flute, Ravel's Violin Sonata in G major and Franceschini's Les Excentriques (Traité physionomique à l’usage des curieux)
Ensemble intercontemporain
Wigmore Hall
Stalls D4, £5 under-35 ticket
20 June 2017
Wigmore page
All credit to whoever designed this programme: by the time we got to the final ensemble piece we'd had the opportunity to admire each of the performers in solo performances (with the exception of cellist Eric-Maria Couturier, who is so sonorously sounded that he doesn't really need a solo work to strut his stuff). The wide-ranging repertory encompassed familiar and unfamiliar, new and decades-old, intelligently selected to show even the known works in new light. I guess this is just what Ensemble intercontemporain does, but it's impressive nonetheless.
The only piece on this programme that fell flat for me was Maderna's Viola, which I'm afraid I could make neither heads nor tails of. At the time I thought maybe this was in part due to the reticent performance of violist Odile Auboin but given her performances in the Schoeller and Franceschini I'm not sure this can be right. Otherwise the concert was a chocolate box of wonderful music wonderfully played, from the elliptical Debussy with clarinetist Jérôme Comte to the no-nonsense virtuosity of flautist Sophie Cherrier in the Messiaen and Berio, the tireless, intuitive piano accompaniment of Hidéki Nagano the programme's sturdy spine. Only violinist Jeanne-Marie Conquer seemed a little dissatisfied with her account of the second Ravel sonata, but nevertheless her and Nagano's performance, along with the context of the other pieces of this programme, thrilling revelled in the piece's strangeness.
The highlight for me was the Schoeller: an extremely entertaining circus of a piece that I could have listed to all over again straight away. Just as impressive but in a very different way was the concert's UK premiere, the Franceschini for full ensemble, a Wigmore co-commission. Eavesdropping on other audience members as we left the hall I gathered that most felt very upbeat about the work, but for me it was an utterly depressing, if engrossing, work, filled with raucous ditties that slid inexorably apart, melting agonizingly into misshapen grotesquerie. Maybe it was just my mood.
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