Commemorating the 25th anniversary of Benjamin Britten's death, the Nash Ensemble re-created the experience of hearing his early work back in the 1930s and 40s. It is rarely that the Wigmore fields a whole orchestra, yet it was here that many early performances were given of such works as his orchestral song-cycles.
Britten's Opus 1 was written in 1932, when he was still a student at the Royal College of Music. In this three-movement Sinfonietta the teenage Britten may not yet have found his voice, but already his use of the orchestra was masterly. This is a work that, as here, can be performed with just five woodwind and five stringed instruments. The surprising echoes of Berg and Schoenberg - Britten's heroes at the time - remain disconcerting.
Even more striking was the concluding work of the concert, Les Illuminations, a setting of prose-poems by Rimbaud. It was WH Auden, then an important influence on Britten, who introduced him to the work of the French decadent. Britten's inspiration was singer Sophie Wyss, and though tenors have often appropriated the cycle, not least Peter Pears, it works best with a soprano. Joan Rodgers was in radiant voice, with Martyn Brabbins the incisive conductor. The surreal element in the sequence was enhanced, with logic abandoned in favour of a cinematic, dream-like parade of contrasting elements. More so than usual, Les Illuminations seemed to match the achievement of Britten's later orchestral cycles, the Serenade and Nocturne.
The confidence of his setting of French came out too in the three French folk-songs, also sung by Rodgers, with Ian Brown at the piano. These pointed the way to the French theme of the rest of the programme. The subtlety of Fauré's late Piano Trio in D minor was well caught by the Nash players, though this is a piece that never quite lives up to the promise of its material. It was different in Debussy's fantasy for unaccompanied flute, Syrinx, which, thanks to the artistry of Philippa Davies, had one forgetting any thinness of texture in its ethereal echoing of L'après-midi d'un faune.
