There were three premieres – two world, one a first for London – in the latest edition of the Nash Ensemble’s annual showcase of contemporary British music, as well as return visits to three other pieces premiered by the group, by Huw Watkins, Colin Matthews and Julian Anderson.
The work being introduced to London was Peter Maxwell Davies’s A Sea of Cold Flame, completed in 2015. It proved to be his final setting of George Mackay Brown, whose poetry had been so important in shaping Davies’s music when he first settled in Orkney in the early 1970s. A baritone soloist (Roderick Williams here) is shadowed by a solo cello (Adrian Brendel) and supported by a string quartet, weaving the three Mackay Brown poems, about the harshness of Orkney life, into a continuous sequence, and at one point dissolving into wordless humming of a curiously aimless melody.
There was a new vocal work from Matthews too, much more concise and much more effective. It Rains, a setting of Edward Thomas for baritone and 11 instruments, which Martyn Brabbins conducted, gives a death march-like tread to the bittersweet pastoral poem that Williams sang with perfect guileless purity. And Simon Holt’s wind quintet, commissioned by the Nash, offered something strikingly different. Bagatelarañas (a title synthesised from the Spanish words for “bagatelle”, “material” and “cobwebs”) is a sequence of six vivid brief movements, which work their way from nervy and glittering to dark and ruminative and back again in the space of barely a quarter of an hour.
• On BBC Radio 3’s Hear and Now on 29 April.
