The 100th anniversary of Lennox Berkeley's birth fell last Monday. His music is no longer fashionable, partly because its notable qualities - good manners and immaculate instrumental writing - seem less significant now than they did in his lifetime, when, with Walton, Tippett and Britten, he was part of the generation of British composers that defined their country's music in the post-war period. But centenaries encourage reassessment with a bit of historical detachment, and the works included in the Nash Ensemble's tribute provided that opportunity.
Berkeley is usually regarded as the most Frenchified of British composers. That's the result of musical upbringing more than anything: as an Oxford graduate in the 1920s, Berkeley was taken up by Ravel, who arranged for him to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger.
Yet what strikes one now about his works, such as the prewar Sonatina for flute and piano, and the Horn Trio and the Sextet from the 1950s, all included in the expertly delivered Nash programme, is not their Gallic affiliations, but how much they owe to Hindemith in their strenuous counterpoint and expressive economy.
His music was like Hindemith's in another, less admirable way too, in that elegance of form seemed to matter more than originality of content. Berkeley rarely came up with a good tune; his works are suavely put together, but they do not linger in the mind.
That lack of melodic distinction is underlined in the songs - the response to words seems generalised, the phrasing sometimes awkward. In the group here (from his Auden settings of 1958, and from the French songs of 1940), one just longed for an idea to take off, to blossom lyrically and expansively.
The Nash mixed Berkeley's music with Ravel's Three Mallarmé Poems (delectably sung by Joan Rodgers) and a group from Poulenc's song-cycle La Court Paille. There was a new piece by Berkeley's son Michael, too.
His Gethsemane, for tenor, piano and string quartet, delivered intensely by Toby Spence, seems like a dark-hued fragment from a latter-day passion, with a text culled from the gospels in which Christ rails against his fate.
