When chamber music brings together performers who are considerable solo artists in their own right, the collective satisfaction at the meeting of musical minds is discernible. There was clearly considerable affinity here between violinist Tamsin Little, cellist Paul Watkins and pianist Martin Roscoe. And, in the otherwise unprepossessing context of Sir Thomas Picton School in Haverfordwest, the intensity and quality of intimacy in their programme of 20th-century French music made of this concert something remarkable.
Debussy's Violin Sonata, Ravel's Piano Trio and Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time were written within a space of 27 years, all in the shadow of war. Here, the logic that linked the three pieces brought an overall freshness and luminosity that was revealing. For Debussy, writing towards the end of the first world war, the battle was also with the cancer soon to defeat him. Little and Roscoe gave the work a valedictory air: wistful without being sentimental, each matching the other in subtlety of tone-colour. Even the more bravura style of the finale had a hauntingly graceful restraint.
Roscoe played the opening of Ravel's Trio with a quiet radiance that seemed to belong to another world. Subsequently, the urgency and passion with which the music was taken up by violin and cello mirrored the composer's eagerness to complete the piece so that he could go and fight for his country (as it turned out, he was too puny to be enlisted). In retrospect, it seemed the radiance and finesse of the sonata and the trio - its slow passacaglia given a joyously arching form - had met and merged with the translucent sound world of Olivier Messiaen.
Little, Watkins and Roscoe were joined by the clarinettist Joan Enric Lluna for the quartet, which was written in the Görlitz prisoner-of-war camp in 1941 and first performed there by Messiaen and three fellow prisoners. The composer's aim from early in his career was to transcend the tyranny of time in musical form, hence in part the title of this piece. In this exemplary performance, time did indeed seem to stand still. It was testimony to the extraordinary capacity of the human spirit to overcome adversity and aspire to the divine.
