The Endymion Ensemble has made its Composer's Choice series an annual event at the Purcell Room, where major British figures are challenged to concoct a programme that places their own music in context. Jonathan Dove, George Benjamin and Alexander Goehr were invited this year, and for Tuesday's concert Goehr had put together a typically thoughtful programme, in which his works were heard alongside Eisler and Webern, two composers from the 20th century Austro-German tradition that has formed the backdrop to his creative development.
At a time when Eisler's songs are finally getting the recognition they deserve, it was good to hear an example of his beautifully crafted instrumental writing. Fourteen Ways of Describing Rain doubled as a 70th birthday tribute to his teacher Schoenberg (the instrumental ensemble echoes that of Pierrot Lunaire) and as a film score, each of its neat, sparkling sequence of miniatures perfectly distinct in texture and colour. Then two of Webern's most densely impacted sets of songs - the Three Traditional Rhymes and the Five Canons on Latin Texts - enclosed Goehr's own Three Songs Op 60, which take texts describing mysterious rituals from Ovid, and give them quirky, sometimes disquieting musical frames.
One of the most impressive of Goehr's recent compositions filled the second half of the programme. Sing Ariel is a 50-minute song-cycle, though of an unconventional kind. The text, compiled by the literary critic Frank Kermode (a Cambridge colleague of the composer), is a work of art in its own right. Goehr describes it as a "poem of poems", taking extracts from a wide range of sources - Spenser to Stevens, Milton to Craig Raine - and shaping them into a marvellously allusive sequence that charts a kind of progression from youth to old age. Auden's poem The Sea and the Mirror, a line from which forms the title of the cycle, acts as prologue and epilogue.
Goehr's setting is by turns elliptical and witheringly direct. The mezzo soloist (Louise Mott, making every syllable matter) is shadowed by a pair of sopranos (Sarah Leonard and Eileen Hulse, soloists in the earlier Goehr and Webern respectively); the instrumental ensemble contains saxophone and trumpet. There are sudden eruptions of instrumental virtuosity, including a wracked double-bass cadenza, and a centrepiece of mysterious bleakness with a complete setting of Philip Larkin's Unfinished Poem. Perhaps the work is fractionally too long, but there are many rewards along the way.
