Waley-Cohen, Manchester Camerata, Pether, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester review - premiere of no ordinary violin concerto

Manchester Camerata is enhancing its reputation for pioneering with three performances featuring Nick Martin’s new Violin Concerto, which it has commissioned, two of them in art galleries rather than conventional music venues.

So the concerto had its world premiere in The Whitworth, Manchester’s university-linked gallery, with the second performance at The Hepworth in Huddersfield. There’s a reason for that: Martin has taken his inspiration from “a carved torso-sized, cradle-like form, in elm, with nine strings of fishing line” by Barbara Hepworth: it’s called Landscape Sculpture.

In it (as he explained before the performances – I heard the first of two on the the same evening in Manchester) he sees images of a cradle, a boat and a stringed instrument, and the idea of mother and child gave rise to the kind of relationship he’s created between soloist and orchestra in this work.

It’s no ordinary concerto: there’s almost no overt display for the solo violin, indeed its role is at times almost subservient to that of the orchestra and its component parts. It’s scored for flutes, oboe, cor anglais, horns and strings, and, though constructed in three movements, it has a quality of serenity and uses mainly slowly moving, sustained textures that permeate all three (and the second segued into the third almost imperceptibly), making up a work that seems almost trance-like over its near-40-minute span.

It was given a focused and carefully blended initiation, and his objective of capturing the feelings of care and trust shared by a mother and a child was fully realized by the Camerata, with Tamsin Waley-Cohen as the often self-effacing but also warmly expressive soloist, and Caroline Pether (pictured) presiding from the score to ensure smooth, neat entries and sustain the music’s flow amid many subtle tempo changes – and occasionally resuming her familiar role as leader/director of the ensemble at the same time. Martin’s style is often of slowly-built accumulations of textures, fundamentally tonal (though with some pitch-bending at the outset) and to me reminiscent of some of the similarly passionate and meditative writing of Peteris Vasks.

It begins on a unison (and returns to it near the end); there’s a kind of refrain of slowly descending, overlapping lines, creating the effect of constantly merging suspensions and resolutions, and sections exploiting other kinds of string articulation – rapid figurations, string-crossing ostinati, pizzicati and tremolando-pizzicati – the effect is of a seascape that’s both constantly moving and essentially still.

That may be something to do with its links to St Ives in Cornwall, Martin’s parents’ home and a place beloved of Barbara Hepworth. I fancied I heard something almost like seagull cries at one point in the music, though perhaps that’s overly wishful.

But the Hepworth/St Ives connection was exploited further in the concert playlist, which had the new piece immediately preceded by Priaulx Rainier’s Movement for strings, a piece written for the festival at the seaside arts hotspot (where Hepworth and Rainier were involved) but never performed there and only relatively recently brought to publication and performance. By contrast with Martin’s work it seems austere in its spare textures and sense of declamation and raw simplicity. It intensifies in pulse and complexity, with intertwining lines demanding much of its players – directed from the violin by Caroline Pether – before reaching, at last, a single concord.

Childhood was the link to the earlier items in the programme. The first two movements of Britten’s Simple Symphony (based on tunes he wrote as a child) revealed a wistful opening and restrained second theme in the “Boisterous Bourrée” and then a surprisingly boisterous attack on the "girls-and-boys-come-out-to-play" theme of the “Playful Pizzicato” – from which it emerged none the worse, as a jolly romp.

Tamsin Waley-Cohen was director for the opening work – Mozart’s Symphony no. 1, an extraordinary achievement for one who was eight years old when he wrote it (though a pretty astonishingly mature musician). There were lively contrasts and crescendi amid the galanterie of the opening movement, lovely tone from the horns of Naomi Atherton and Mark Bennett in the second, and more substance than you might have thought possible in the brief finale. 

• · To be repeated tonight at The Hepworth, Wakefield, and on 18 September at Kings Place, London 

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