This year’s Mozartfest boasted a particularly appealing programme with stellar performers, and it was possible to come by tickets for all the concerts we wanted to go to – maybe a consequence of austerity? I made a point of going to the first Saturday morning concert in the Assembly Rooms, with the festival regulars, the Nash Ensemble, who brought along with them the likes of Michael Collins and Adrian Brendel.
Mozart’s string quintet K593 had a formal sophistication which marked it out as a late work and in some sense the most mature work on the programme. Weber’s Clarinet Quintet in B flat was essentially a showcase for the clarinettist (Michael Collins) – a concerto with the orchestra replaced by a string quartet. They had an accompanying role and you never really got to hear them pass material around themselves or have a solo line as individuals. Once you accepted that, it was an enjoyable piece with a virtuoso clarinet line played with ease.
Beethoven made various youthful excursions into multi-instrument chamber music, and in the early days of this blog I wrote about the Nash Ensemble playing one of the less successful ones. By the time he wrote the Septet he’d solved the problems of balancing the instruments, and after the Weber I was carefully checking that everyone had their moment of glory. They did – a set of variations gave good opportunities for this – and even the double-bass player came through in some of the lighter scored passages. The work has the multi-movement form of a serenade, and as far as I can tell is the earliest septet to have made a mark on musical history, with quite a few later composers taking up the challenge.
The concert was well attended, but I saw very few of school age, which is a shame when the timing was friendly to young people. I still think about the chandeliers in the Assembly Rooms, but having watched some of the world gymnastics championships recently, I now imagine the sort of routine a top gymnast might construct around them.