It was with great pleasure that we welcomed back for the third year running the outstanding young musicians of the Purcell School. We have come to expect a quality of playing from them that requires no allowances for youth to be made and once again such expectations were amply fulfilled. There was the added excitement of what must surely be a premiere for Leicester, a work for solo cello entitled Unlocked by Judith Weir, the Master ( should it be the Mistress I wonder? ) of what is now the King’s Music. But more of that later.
The concert opened with two movements from Dohnanyi’s Serenade Op10. played by Dominic Drutac (Violin) ,Tifany Rodas (viola ) and Lindsey Lim (cello). Again, this was a premiere as far as I was concerned, though I had heard the composer’s Sextet at a Festival concert long ago and was sufficiently impressed with it to buy a recording. As the programme pointed out, this was an early work but the two movements we heard certainly had an energy about them that was very winning. It was also demanding of the instrumentalists and at the beginning the playing, though perfectly acceptable, seemed a little restrained as if for everyone accuracy was more important than going for it full on, no doubt the result of understandable opening nerves. However, soon the blood began to flow, the playing took wing and the brio of the piece began to be communicated fully.
And so to what turned out to be very much the meat in the sandwich, Judith Weir’s Unlocked, premiered in 1999. It is a work written for solo cello and inspired by a collection of folksongs mainly gained from black prisoners who had been held in Southern jails. In form it is five fantasias on five songs, using every feature that the cello offers as an instrument, including in one of the movements asking the performer to use its wood percussive effect! The Purcell School seem to be attracted by music that does this. I remember some years ago when they first visited the programme featured a work for harp in which the composer asked the player similarly to convert this gentle instrument into something percussive and to startling effect. Such was the result in the performance given by Lindsey Lim of this Fantasia No. 4 based on the song The Keys of the Prison. Here I thought the content with great force thrust into one’s face the appalling way in which the South treated, and perhaps still treats, black people and the suffering that ensues. Though gentler, the sadness of the other fantasias on a first hearing seemed music of the front rank, keenly aware of the possibilities the cello offers and fully stretching the player without asking for anything beyond what felt right for the instrument. In this instance the capacity of the player Lindsey Lim at the beginning of a career to deliver with apparently complete confidence the huge challenges the work presented was truly astonishing and fully merited the cheers that greeted the work’s finish.
The last work featured of the published concert was Cesar Franck’s Piano Quintet or at least the last two movements. Here the players were Henrietta Dagliesh and Dominic Drutag, violins, Fiona Chow ,viola, Ella Harrison cello and Thomas Wan, Piano. Again, the playing was of a very high standard, achieving usually clarity of texture, not always very easy with the music of this composer. One can perhaps understand why Saint-Saens, the dedicatee and the pianist at the premiere and whose music is renowned for being easy listening then and now, should have stormed out when the performance had finished. Franck can be a tough nut to crack with what seems his tendency to meander and repeat, coupled with a thickness of the sound. A recent Prom performance of the Symphony to me just seemed interminable as it plodded on and yet when I put on an old recording of Sir Thomas Beecham it revived all the reasons I had felt the work impressive despite the occasional longueur. It was a tribute to these young players that I felt the same here.
And that should have been the end of the concert but the organisers had a trick up their sleeves in the shape of the pianist of the quintet, Thomas Wan, who comes we were told from a certain rival East Midlands city to the north of Leicester. He was given the chance to play solo and he clearly leaped at the opportunity to deliver the drama and virtuosity of a Rachmaninov Etude. It made a staggering end to a concert that left one confident for the future of classical music.
The Diary of a Leicester Concert-goer 