While his latest opera has been in rehearsal for its UK premiere at Covent Garden next week, George Benjamin has been renewing his long association with Ensemble Modern. They are touring a couple of programmes together, and brought one of them to the Wigmore Hall for a rare British appearance by these Frankfurt-based musicians, who for their versatility and virtuosity have few peers among Europe’s specialist contemporary-music groups.
Their concert mixed modernist classics by Varèse, Ravel and Schoenberg with recent works, one of which was Benjamin’s own arrangement for nine instruments of two movements from Bach’s Art of Fugue – the Canon in Hypodiapason, with the horns adding bursts of exuberance to the busy layers of plucked and bowed strings, and Contrapunctus 7, in which a solo flute leads the way, as the music runs through its tricksy repertoire of inversions and augmentations. There was also music by a former pupil of Benjamin, the Jordanian Saed Haddad; his Mirage, Mémoire, Mystère is specified as a work for “solo violin and string trio”, though the two violins take turns in that solo role, differentiating themselves from their colleagues with contrasting material to create a constantly shifting dialogue of delicate, elusive textures.
A fierce account of Varèse’s Octandre, its brassy textures seeming almost too confrontational for the Wigmore Hall, had begun the concert, and Benjamin ended it with Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony, in a performance that brilliantly conveyed the work’s unstoppable energy and stylistic instability, with its curdled reminiscences of 19th-century romanticism teetering on the edge of a new atonal musical world.
The soprano Anna Prohaska had provided the concert’s centrepiece, wrapping her velvety tones sensuously around Ravel’s Trois Poèmes de Mallarmé, as Benjamin arranged the iridescent instrumental colours immaculately around her. And partnered by Ensemble Modern’s pianist Ueli Wiget, Prohaska also came up with more Varèse as an encore, his 1906 setting of Verlaine, Un Grand Sommeil Noir, to which she gave a compelling incantation-like intensity.
