FOR the Festival’s main concert-hall event nothing could be finer than the distinguished acoustic – as distinct from electronic – instrumental group the Nieuw Ensemble who are regular and much-loved visitors to Huddersfield.
Over the last 27 years some 400 works have been written for them and their brilliant Principal Conductor Ed Spanjaard, and last night they gave the British premières of seven more by composers from China, Holland, England, Kuwait, Japan and France.
These new works honoured the Ensemble’s unique trademark sound which is generated by the inclusion of mandolin, guitar, harp and celeste in the mix of winds, strings and percussion.
Five of them had a reflective quality, with string glissandi and harmonics much in evidence along with gentle microtones, and they ranged in effect from Paul Usher’s fragmentary On the Thread of a Tune to Misato Mochizuki’s Silent Circle which featured astonishing extended techniques from flute soloist Harrie Starreveld and the traditional Japanese zither-like koto played by Makiko Goto.
But two were quite different.
Giel Vleggaar’s Atomic UFO Saves the Day (Again) had an inexorable threatening pulse pushed along by bass guitar soloist Mark Haanstra.
La Belle Chocolatière by Mayke Nas – who describes herself as “composer, searcher, slow-food cook, Bach fugue player” – was a pizzicato driven four minute whimsical delight.
The most awesome spectacle of the evening came from violin soloist Irvine Arditti, who replaced a broken string in the middle of Brice Pauset’s Vita Nova with no interruption to the music.
The most brilliantly executed string change ever!
