Vivid images of dispersal and desperation dominated the second concert of the Nash Ensemble's New Music Series. Thomas Adès's Catch and Oliver Knussen's Mask featured parts for walkabout instrumentalists: Richard Hosford was the elusive clarinettist in Adès's quartet, while Philippa Davies combined theatrical and technical accomplishment in Knussen's clearly imagined solo work.
But Richard Causton's Rituals of Hunting and Blooding for (stationary) ensemble, commissioned and premiered by the Nash under Martyn Brabbins, was the most immediately arresting piece of the evening. The first movement, Terror of the Hunted, opened with gestures of violence and volatility, with Hosford's screaming clarinet line grating against Simon Limbrick's menacing cowbells and drums.
Despite the movement's apparently frenzied increase in activity, with clarinet and piccolo enhanced by trumpet and trombone wails, the music remained curiously static. The texture was dominated by insistent, irregular percussion rhythms, which seemed to grind the momentum of the surrounding parts to a standstill. Causton's depiction of "terror" was broad-brush and strangely undynamic - like a freeze-frame photograph of a hunt rather than an animate, vital battle sequence.
The Blooding of the second movement provided a complete contrast, with mellifluous vibraphone replacing the opening movement's staccato. Within The Blooding's soft-hued harmonic palette and sense of detachment, John Wallace's concluding flugelhorn solo provided the richest commentary on the preceding pursuit. Like a dissonantly transformed hunting horn, Wallace's instrument no longer sounded the call to the kill, but lamented the victims of the chase.
Mezzo-soprano Jean Rigby was reunited with Brabbins and the ensemble in James Macmillan's song cycle Raising Sparks, as this team gave its first performance in 1997. The work sets texts by Michael Symmons Roberts, with whom Macmillan collaborated on his Proms commission, Quickening, last year. There are some impressive moments, such as the melismatic violin solo surrounded by a shimmer of harp chords and florid piano figuration at the end of the third song.
This was a committed performance, but there is sometimes an oppressive weightiness about these settings. Macmillan's operatic vocal writing and transparent instrumental imagery create a music that cannot escape the centrifugal symbolism of the poetry. Sally Beamish's wordless expression of mourning in Between Earth and Sea was less ambitious but just as affecting: an elegiac, salt-kissed study in weightless melody for flute, harp and viola.
