VoxCarnyx

Dirleton Kirk, East Lothian

The Lammermuir Festival has a fine track record of bringing musicians together in interesting combinations to explore new repertoire. When it invites the Kaleidoscope Chamber Collective, the group arrives with much of that work already done.

The regular cellist with Kaleidoscope, Laura van der Heijden, is the festival’s artist in residence this year and she will appear with other groups of friends and as a soloist with the Royal Northern Sinfonia before it ends. She began the commitment more gently, as a member of the ensemble founded by pianist Tom Poster and his violinist partner Elena Orioste.

Poster is a pianist of formidable relaxed skill who wears his musical erudition lightly, but the second of Kaleidoscope’s recitals at Dirleton Kirk demonstrated his special programming ability.

It was designed to showcase the virtuoso flute playing of Adam Walker, and thus immediately suggested a focus on French music of the last century, where and when composers were especially attracted to writing for the instrument.

Of the four works featuring Walker, however, only the Poulenc Flute Sonata was at all familiar, and few if any of the capacity audience would have known the earlier pieces played.

Intriguingly, they each teamed the flautist and piano with one of the string players, beginning with Urioste in the Suite en trio by Mel Bonis. Another triptych, the Trois femmes de Legende, has already brought the almost forgotten Bonis to Scottish attention, with both the RSNO and BBC SSO playing the orchestrated piano pieces recently, and this chamber work was similarly finely-wrought. A salon conversation with the listening violin responding to the flute’s lead, the work becomes more muscular in the closing Scherzo, driven by the keyboard.

Philippe Gaubert is also little remembered as a composer, although he was a well-known flautist and conductor in the early part of the 20th century. His Three Aquarelles, with cello completing the trio, are not especially pictorial but explore the full ranges of all three instruments and the dynamic possibilities of their combination in elegant style. Where  the Bonis began with a Serenade, the Gaubert closed with one, but it was the central slower section, with solos for cello, flute and piano in sequence, that was the most beguiling.

Maurice Durufle is not known as a composer of chamber music because he didn’t write much of it, and the Prelude, Recitatif et Variations from 1928 is the only piece he published. Quite different in structure from the music that preceded it, this was the composer looking back to early music from a modernist perspective, if one far from as experimental as some of his contemporaries. With violist Vicki Powell as the string addition, the unfolding of those Variations developed with building intensity, making for a powerful conclusion to the first half of the concert.

The Poulenc, it hardly needs saying, was brilliantly played by Walker and Poster. This is core repertoire for a virtuoso flautist and this one barely looked at his score in a performance of technical and expressive virtuosity. The attack he achieves on the instrument and the fluidity of his fingering is a class apart, and Poster’s rippling keyboard skills and considered dynamic control made for a perfect partnership.

The programme concluded without Walker, with Faure’s Piano Quartet No 1, a beautifully-shaped early work that followed on from the works that Poster and the strings had played on Friday evening.

If this was young Faure expressing his broken heart after being jilted by Marianne Viardot, that melancholy is most eloquently expressed in the cello-led Adagio. The Scherzo that precedes it was particularly enticing, with bright pizzicato strings and sparkling keyboard playing.

As the growing number of Kaleidoscope fans had surely hoped, Poster revealed one of his bespoke arrangements for all five musicians by way of a unique encore. If Henry Mancini’s Moon River might appear to have little relationship with the rest of the programme, Urioste pointed out the composer was a flute and piano player who honed his arranging skills with the US Air Force Band, serving in France in the Second World War.

Keith Bruce

Pictured: Laura van der Heijden