MUSIC REVIEW: Ensemble 10/10, St George's Hall

Jun 12 2008 by Glyn Mon Hughes, Liverpool Daily Post

IT’S NOT that long ago when, if a concert promoter put on a piece of Schoenberg, it equated to the heights of bravery – or total box-office foolhardiness.

Things have changed, though. I well remember being at a BBC Prom in the 1980s when the Royal Albert Hall was packed to the rafters for a difficult and challenging orchestral piece by this Viennese master musician.

And things were not much different at the latest Ensemble 10/10 concert, where just a few places were available for what was a challenging programme.

Throughout recent weeks, it’s been good to see how the Philharmonic’s various programmes have linked in with the Klimt exhibition at the Tate, not to mention other events here and there in the city. It’s good to see that level of co-operation – at last. These are challenging times for arts organisations and all co-working has to be good for the future of the arts in this city post 2008.

So, this concert? It was hard to say which was the centrepiece: James Wishart’s new commission The Punishment of Lust, or the performance of Schoenberg’s epic and challenging Pierrot Lunaire.

This is a work straddling two musical worlds – those of the atonality which was beginning to challenge the old order and those of total musical complicity, including strict counterpoint . . . the music of the old world.

And what a performance, which put both these worlds into perspective. This work is no easy piece to bring off, and stand-in mezzo- soprano Rachel Gilmore accomplished much. So, too, did the ensemble – as always – and music director Clark Rundell can be proud of what was achieved in this concert.

It was good, too, to hear a work of James Wishart, consistently a supporter of new music in Liverpool. His "libretto" proved a complex fusion of ideas largely inspired by Seganiti’s paining, Il castigo delle lussuriose, which hangs in the Walker Art Gallery. Again, an inspired performance by Emma Morwood brought this work alive.

Add to that the luscious tones of Zemlinsky – his Walzerzwischenspiel – and Schreker’s Valse Lente, as well as Webern’s curiously microscopic Six Pieces and Berg’s Hier ist Freud, it proved another triumph for Ensemble 10/10.