Composer Michael Berkeley is used to living with the achievements of his father, the composer Lennox Berkeley. His programme with the Endymion Ensemble, however, was a timely reminder of the way Michael has followed his own compositional path. The concert revealed where he sees his main musical influences and enthusiasms: there was no music by Lennox. Instead, three of his own pieces were framed by music from Janacek, Ravel and Simon Holt.
For Mrs Tomayasu was a new arrangement of an aria from Berkeley's 1982 anti-nuclear oratorio, Or Shall We Die?, which dramatises the grief of a mother who discovers her daughter among the ruins of Hiroshima. Berkeley's affecting and delicate music escapes the dangers of mawkishness or sentimentality; here, soprano Gweneth-Ann Jeffers created a desperate lament from the solo part.
The other, violent side of Berkeley's music was represented in For the Savage Messiah, a piano quintet inspired by the sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, whose remarkable life and career were cut short in the trenches in 1915. The piece demands a massive musical energy from its five players, as a chaotic tangle of lines explodes from the powerful opening chord. Despite its undoubted intensity, the piece lost focus in Endymion's performance, as the extreme physical gestures of the piece became merely noisy rather than expressive.
The ensemble piece Entertaining Master Punch was more successful. A reworking of music from Berkeley's first opera, Baa Baa Black Sheep, the piece creates two different musical worlds, as a constricting noose of dissonant counterpoint gradually loosens and the music evolves into a liberated realm of gongs and glittering, gamelan-like melodic lines for flute, harp, and trumpet.
Yet Simon Holt's Sphinx trumped even this depiction of musical exoticism. The piece creates a magical musical partnership in which tuned gongs provide a delicate halo around the music of a cor anglais. The work is suffused with silence, and Melinda Maxwell and percussionist Richard Benjafield made a mysterious ritual from the cor anglais's florid lines and the gentle peals of the gongs.
