While his latest opera has been in rehearsal for its UK premiere at Covent Garden next week, George Benjamin has been renewing his long association with Ensemble Modern. They are touring a couple of programmes together, and brought one of them to the Wigmore Hall for a rare British appearance by these Frankfurt-based musicians, who for their versatility and virtuosity have few peers among Europe’s specialist contemporary-music groups.
Their concert mixed modernist classics by Varèse, Ravel and Schoenberg with recent works, one of which was Benjamin’s own arrangement for nine instruments of two movements from Bach’s Art of Fugue – the Canon in Hypodiapason, with the horns adding bursts of exuberance to the busy layers of plucked and bowed strings, and Contrapunctus 7, in which a solo flute leads the way, as the music runs through its tricksy repertoire of inversions and augmentations. There was also music by a former pupil of Benjamin, the Jordanian Saed Haddad; his Mirage, Mémoire, Mystère is specified as a work for “solo violin and string trio”, though the two violins take turns in that solo role, differentiating themselves from their colleagues with contrasting material to create a constantly shifting dialogue of delicate, elusive textures.
