It would be hard to overstate the Nash Ensemble’s impact on the creation of new chamber music in the UK: more than 330 works since Amelia Freedman founded it as a student 60 years ago. The group’s anniversary season at Wigmore Hall, already peppered with new commissions, culminated in a day of concerts of which the finale contained four more world premieres, plus works from previous round-number anniversaries. Stravinsky’s 1920 Concertino was the outlier in this context, but its punchy, bouncy rhythmic drive made it a good opener.
First of the “old” Nash works was Elliott Carter’s 2004 Mosaic, in which seven other instruments are corralled into cohesion by the harp: a virtual concerto, and a winning showcase here for the harpist Hugh Webb. Peter Maxwell Davies’s 2014 String Quintet was the weightiest work on the programme, infused with hints of Orkney music and with striking moments for the pair of cellos, played here by Adrian Brendel and Gemma Rosefield. Julian Anderson’s Van Gogh Blue, a Nash commission from 2015, struggled to hold its intensity as the two clarinettists moved around the hall between movements, but the sounds created by them and the ensemble, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, were increasingly evocative nonetheless, the finale a cacophony of unruly swirls like the artist’s Starry Night.
Leading the four premieres, Simon Holt’s Acrobats on a Loose Wire also made spatial use of the hall: the flautist Philippa Davies played from the balcony, sounding acrobatic and bird-like too, while the string trio on stage formed the wire, their music tensing and relaxing. Heard simultaneously, the two aspects felt coincidental rather than cohesive, at least until the final moments.
John Casken’s Mantle, a vibrant yet emollient movement for piano and wind quintet full of restlessly dancing motion, seemed perfectly geared to the occasion. So, too, did Colin Matthews’ Canon – an introduction and four songs setting Christopher Reid’s whimsical poetry about alphabets and animals. Few sopranos can sell a new song as convincingly as Claire Booth, and though it was a shame the high-lying lines made it hard to hear the words, she was on form here.
But the piece I immediately wanted to hear again was Helen Grime’s Long Have I Lain Beside the Water, a haunting setting of words by Zoe Gilbert in which Grime’s close, charged writing finds the six instruments lending the singer a luminous, otherworldly aura.
