SINFONIETTA: BRITTEN, VAUGHAN WILLIAMS & MORE
Ensemble 360
Crucible Playhouse, Sheffield
Friday 23 May 2025, 7.00pm
Tickets:
£22
£14 UC, PIP & DLA
£5 Students & Under 35s

KNUSSEN Cantata for Oboe and String Trio (11′)
RAVEL Piano Trio in A Minor (28′)
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Piano Quintet in C minor (40′)
BRITTEN Sinfonietta (15′)
This sumptuous exploration of an intricate musical family tree unpacks the influence of some of the 20th century’s greatest composers upon one another. The shimmering colours of Ravel’s exquisite Piano Trio, which drew on eclectic sources including Basque folk dance and Malaysian verse-forms, was highly influential in helping that most English of composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams, to find his own musical voice. While Benjamin Britten, whose student Oliver Knussen opens this concert, wrestled with and resisted the legacy of Vaughan Williams throughout his life, his echoes can be heard, not least in this early taut and twitchy work that brings this programme to a swaggering conclusion.
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KNUSSEN Oliver, Cantata for oboe and string trio Op.15
Oliver Kunssen started work on Cantata at Tanglewood in 1975 and finished it over two years later in London. Knussen described this period as one of ‘considerable frustration and little completed work’, but three pieces were finished: Autumnal for violin and piano, Sonya’s Lullaby for piano and Cantata. Together they form trilogy, of which Cantata is the third and final part. Knussen’s aim was to write something ‘consciously more relaxed and lyrical’ in Cantata than in its companion pieces, while also aiming for a compact structure. After a slow introduction, the music moves towards a frenetic section in which the solo oboe plays an extravagantly ornamented melodic line over string parts which Knussen himself described as ‘manic’. In the coda, a varied version of the oboe theme returns from the opening, now supported by gentle string figurations before evaporating into silence. Knussen wrote that ‘Although essentially abstract, the work is certainly subjective, which fact may encourage the listener to let the music evoke whatever personal imagery it may contain.’
Nigel Simeone 2025
RAVEL Maurice, Piano Trio
Modéré
Pantoum. Assez vif
Passacaille. Très large
Final. Animé
Ravel spent the summer of 1914 hard at work on the Piano Trio in the French Basque village of Saint-Jean-de-Luz. The outbreak of World War I in August spurred him on to finish, and by September he was able to tell Stravinsky that ‘my Trio is finished’. It is one of the great works of the early twentieth-century chamber music repertoire. In his study of the genre, Basil Smallman writes that Ravel’s Trio ‘combines the brilliant string techniques of his early string quartet – double octave spacing, harmonics, tremolandi, and extended pizzicato passages and trills – with the powerful and evocative piano writing developed in Miroirs (1904 and Gaspard de la nuit in order to achieve some entirely new effects of colour and expression in trio-writing.’
The opening movement is based on a gently lopsided rhythm (two groups of three beats alternating with one group of two beats) derived from Basque folk music. The main idea is a wistful, modal theme (originally composed for a Basque-inspired piano concerto that Ravel sketched in 1912) that is twice whipped up into an exciting climax. The second movement is called ‘Pantoum’, a poetic form that takes its name from Malaysia but was made famous by French poets of the nineteenth century: Victor Hugo, Leconte de Lisle, Paul Verlaine and Charles Baudelaire (whose ‘Harmonie du soir’ is probably the most famous example of a pantoum, though he doesn’t quite stick to the rules). Brian Newbould has demonstrated that Ravel did more than use the name: he followed the model of a poetic pantoum, finding a musical equivalent. Newbould quotes from a definition of a pantoum: ‘the poem treats two themes of which the one serves as accompaniment to the other’ before showing that Ravel pulled off a remarkable trick here: ‘If all or most features of the pantoum are to be translated into a musical equivalent, then the undertaking must by its very nature present a special challenge to the composer’s powers of integration. Two themes are to be developed alternately, in a coherent fashion, but in such a way that the two strands of development may be extricated and reassembled as separate, intelligible entities. Ravel does in fact attempt this, and succeeds well enough to have left most listeners and commentators oblivious of his feat. [The first idea] is staccato, brittle, percussive in its cross-rhythms: [the second idea] is legato, surging and falling in short breaths.’ This dazzling movement has at its centre a contrasting section in a quite different time signature (four slow beats in a bar as opposed to three quick ones), but at the point where the opening music returns, Ravel combines it with the slow melody in a way that sounds effortless but is both rhythmically complex and brilliantly conceived. The slow movement is a Baroque form: a Passacaglia in which the music is founded on a repeating sequence of notes in the bass. Brahms used this form for the finale of his Fourth Symphony, and Ravel adapts it as an eight-bar repeating phrase, developed with obsessive tenacity, reaching a climax and then fading away. The Finale follows without a break. Ravel’s fabulously inventive use of instrumental colour is immediately apparent with shimmering arpeggios and tremolos on harmonics in the violin and cello, as the piano introduces the asymmetrical main theme, in 5/4 time, later interspersing bars in 7/4 time that extend the same musical idea. The movement ends in a pyrotechnic display of trills and arpeggios.
Nigel Simeone © 2010
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Ralph, Quintet in C minor for violin, viola, cello, double bass and piano
Allegro con fuoco
Andante
Fantasia, quasi variazioni
This Quintet in C minor, scored for the same instrumentation as Schubert’s Trout, was composed in 1903 and revised twice before the first performance at the Aeolian Hall on 14 December 1905, but after a performance in 1918 it was withdrawn by Vaughan Williams. It was finally published in an edition by Bernard Benoliel a century after its composition. Vaughan Williams’s friend and biographer Michael Kennedy speaks of ‘the shadow of Brahms looming over’ the work, and this seems especially true of the expansive first movement. The expressive, romantic melody of the Andante second movement is more characteristic of its composer at this stage in his career, and it has some similarity to the song Silent Noon, composed the same year. The finale is a set of five variations, ending with a beautiful bell-like coda.
As Michael Kennedy observes, what matters with an early work such as this is not whether it anticipates Vaughan Williams’s later masterpieces (for the most part, it doesn’t), but that it is impressive in its own right. He does, however, make an intriguing observation: ‘Vaughan Williams may have withdrawn the Quintet but he did not forget it, for in 1954 he used the theme of the finale, slightly expanded, for the variations in the finale of his Violin Sonata.’
© Nigel Simeone
BRITTEN Benjamin, Sinfonietta Op.1
1. Poco presto ed agitato
2. Variations: Andante lento
3. Tarantella: Presto vivace
Britten was already a very prolific composer by the time he gave this work its designation as his official Opus One. Dedicated to his teacher, Frank Bridge, it was written when Britten was 18 years old, and it already demonstrates his extraordinary imagination. The influence of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony is apparent in places, and the instrumental writing in all three movements has a fluency and flamboyance that quickly became hallmarks of the young Britten’s music. The first public performance was given on 31 January 1933 at the Mercury Theatre, London, in one of the Macnaghten-Lemare concerts played by the English Wind Players and the Macnaghten String Quartet, conducted by Iris Lemare. Britten’s music has always been more enthusiastically received abroad, and on 7 August 1933, the Sinfonietta was broadcast on Radio Strasbourg, conducted by the great Hermann Scherchen. The first British broadcast was a month later, by members of the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Edward Clark.
© Nigel Simeone 2013