The Brunel Ensemble's artfully constructed programme, A Little Night Music, took as its starting point Luigi Dallapiccola's Piccola Musica Notturna before venturing into territory more challenging and darkly atmospheric than any sweet summer serenade. Dallapiccola arranged his original orchestral piece, for a trio each of strings and woodwind plus harp and celeste, as a farewell gesture of thanks. Here its subtle balance of highly lyrical lines with a tightly knit structure effectively set the evening's agenda in compositional terms.
Elisabeth Lutyens and Dallapiccola were contemporaries and respectively the earliest English and Italian proponents of 12-note technique, so her Concertante for Five Players written in 1950 was a perfect complement. Each of its seven movements created a vivid impression with poetic clarity. Lutyens's style was far more passionate than the sterile label of serial abstraction implies, and in conductor Christopher Austin she has a champion arguably more persuasive than any in her lifetime.
By way of a birthday salute to Oliver Knussen - he is 50 on June 12 - the Brunel performed his Songs Without Voices, Op. 26. In these, a lucid succession of ideas emerges from an intricate musical tissue - none more forcefully than the extraordinarily beautiful cor anglais melody and elaborate arabesques of the fourth and last song, written in memory of Andzej Panufnik.
In Lilith, Simon Holt explored the myth of a demoness of the night with music of swirling serpentine lines. More disturbing yet was the Notturno of Richard Causton, played in a revision of his 1998 score. The nightmarish early onslaught gave way to a ghostly viola solo presaging the unearthly calm of a slow chorale, whose final harp murmurs somehow falter and dissipate.
Luke Bedford, aged 24, had his Man Shoots Strangers from Skyscraper premiered here. He demonstrated an acute ear for texture: most striking were the dramatic chordal stings, which gradually relaxed into a sequence of more contemplative, sustained harmonies before ending on a surreal shudder. A short but impressive piece.
