United Kingdom Jacob, Poulenc, Stravinsky: RWCMD Chamber Winds / Robert Aircraft (conductor). Dora Stoutzker Corridor, Royal Welsh Faculty of Music and Drama, Cardiff, 24.10.2025. (GPu)
Gordon Jacob – Previous Wine in New Bottles
Poulenc – Sonata for Two Clarinets
Stravinsky – Octet
Music lovers in South Wales are properly served by the Royal Welsh Faculty of Music and Drama in Cardiff. A selected attraction is the collection of lunchtime live shows, for which tickets often value between £6 and £10; live shows start at 1.15pm and usually end round 2pm, or very quickly after. I do know a number of folks working in Cardiff who time their lunchbreak to have the ability to come to those live shows. Performers within the present season embrace oboist Nicholas Daniel and cellist Jacob Shaw, in addition to live shows resembling this one, given by a scholar ensemble from the school, performed by Robert Aircraft – for some twenty years principal clarinet of the BBC Nationwide Orchestra of Wales and now Head of Woodwind Efficiency at RWCMD.
RWCMD Chamber Winds opened their programme with Gordon Jacob’s Previous Wine in New Bottles, an enticing suite of quick items composed in 1959 and premiered on the St. Bees Music Competition (in Cumbria) in the identical yr. It’s in 4 temporary actions, every an association of an previous English folks track – (i) ‘Wraggle Taggle Gypsies’, (ii) ‘The Three Ravens’, (iii) ‘Begone, Uninteresting Care’ and (iv) ‘Early One Morning’. In every case the unique melody is performed straight and is all the time simply recognisable, however is heard inside, because it have been, a extra ‘trendy’ framework – therefore the title of the suite, the tunes being the ‘previous wine’ and Jacob’s settings for the normal tunes being the ‘new bottles’.
Previous Wine in New Bottles made a superb ‘overture’ (of a form) for this live performance, with its attractively miscellaneous programme. Like most of Jacob’s work it’s neat and well-made music, with a transparent construction, which invitations the performers to get pleasure from themselves and benefit from the people tunes. From the jaunty rhythms of the opening of the ‘Wraggle Taggle Gypsies’ it was clear that this scholar ensemble – made up of two flutes (Lauren Rose and Charlotte Holmes, doubling on piccolo), 2 oboes (Ellen Wilkinson and Tom Warner), two clarinets (Raphael Hitchen and Rita Fedista), two bassoons (Hugh Sergeant and Wendy Lloyd), two saxophones (Ed Thompson and Lio Hamasaki) and two trumpets (Katy Rennie and Holly Baker) – was relished by those that have been performing it, and the viewers was actually able to share their pleasure.
All through the steadiness between devices was spectacular, the feel being enriched by the presence of two non-woodwind devices, the 2 trumpets performed (very properly) by Rennie and Baker. The ultimate piece within the suite – the rousing ‘Early One Morning’, with its reminder – even on this purely instrumental type – of the maiden who fears that her lover is about to desert her, was fairly transferring.
The second piece on the programme was Poulenc’s Sonata for Two Clarinets, composed in 1918 – nearly precisely 50 years earlier than Jacob’s Previous Wine in New Bottles – it’s, to simplify, mildly acidic, the place Jacob’s work is likely to be known as snug. (which I don’t make use of as a damaging time period). It’s in three actions: Presto – Andante – Vif, vite, avec joie. The title phrase, ‘for 2 clarinets’, conceals the truth that it’s written for 2 variations of the instrument: a clarinet in A and the B-flat instrument. The A-flat instrument is pitched a half-step decrease than B-flat. Right here Hitchen performed the A-flat clarinet and Fedista the B-flat.
The sonata is a mere 6-7 minutes or so in efficiency however incorporates a number of difficult components for these performing it. So, for instance, the opening Presto incorporates a passage wherein the 2 clarinettists are required, concurrently, to play in numerous time signatures. There are some large melodic leaps for each musicians within the second and third actions. As was usually the case in Poulenc’s writing for woodwinds, the rating makes use of thirty second notes and double-dotted rhythms. The lengthy melodic line of the second motion is a check of the B-flat clarinettist’s stamina. It’s a tribute to Fedista and Hitchen to document that none of those difficulties derailed their efficiency at any of those moments. They loved – and shared their enjoyment of – Poulenc’s wit and harmonic sharpness.
The programme closed with a piece which in some respects marked the start of twentieth-century neoclassicism, Stravinsky’s Octet, composed in 1922/23 and revised in 1952. Its three actions are marked Sinfonia (Lento), Tema con variazioni and Finale. This engaging studying was given by the flute of Rose, the clarinet of Hitchen, the bassoons of Sergeant and Lloyd, supplemented by the trumpets of Rennie and Baker, the trombone of Emily Collet and the bass trombone of Noah Cory. A number of critics have been disillusioned by the premiere of the Octet (performed by the composer) within the Paris Opera Home in October 1923, describing it as, for instance, ‘a large number of eighteenth-century mannerisms’; Jean Cocteau, who was within the viewers, reported that the work met with a ‘scandal of silence’. Stravinsky’s change of course (stylistically and formally) was clearly too abrupt for a lot of. It could have been such reactions which prompted Stravinsky to put in writing a short, two-page essay on the piece – printed as ‘Some Concepts about my Octuor’ (The Arts 5 (January-June 2024).
This quick essay opens trenchantly ‘My octuor is a musical object’, and later passages develop the implications of this assertion: ‘The explanation why I composed this type of music for an octuor of flute, clarinet, bassoons, trumpets and trombones are the next: first, as a result of this ensemble varieties a whole sonorous scale and consequently furnishes me with a sufficiently wealthy register; second, as a result of the distinction of the amount of those devices renders extra evident the musical structure [….] Kind, in my music derives from counterpoint.’ This temporary essay may be very illuminating, and I believe that the eye of this scholar ensemble had been drawn to it by Robert Aircraft, given the style of the efficiency.
At no level was the music given any type of extreme characterisation or expressiveness, it was performed ‘straight’, because it have been, with restraint and constancy to the rating. Nearly all through the ensemble enjoying was impeccably correct (although in the direction of the top there have been a couple of very minor lapses on this regard – which I might put all the way down to some tiredness on the finish of a reasonably difficult live performance. Stravinsky’s set of variations within the second motion (Andantino) is spectacular and efficient, particularly the ‘waltz’ within the fourth variation and the fugato (variation 7) and these passages have been properly introduced; so have been the syncopated rhythms within the Finale. Some touches of subtlety which one hears in performances by skilled skilled ensembles, such because the Eastman Wind Ensemble and Eastman Virtuosi (on AVIE AV 2277) have been maybe lacking, however that’s to invoke an inappropriate normal of comparability/judgement. Taken by itself phrases, this was – like the remainder of the programme – a efficiency which these scholar performers might (and will) be pleased with.
Glyn Pursglove
