United Kingdom Leith, Werner, Miller, Mustonen – Hidden Mechanisms: Manchester Collective. Purcell Room, London, 9.2.2025. (CC)
Oliver Leith – The big house (2021)
Héloïse Werner – Hidden Mechanisms (2025, London premiere)
Cassandra Miller – Leaving (2011)
Olli Mustonen – Piano Quintet (2014)
Manchester Collective has a mobile, flexible line-up and on this occasion features: Eva Thorarinsdottir and Sarah Brandwood-Spencer (violins); Ruth Gibson (viola), Nick Trygstad (cello), and Junyan Chen (piano). The uniform excellence of this ensemble is very much a known quantity, but on this occasion, there was one major talent that needs flagging, the pianist Junyan Chen, superlative in the Werner and the Mustonen (of which more soon).
First, Oliver Leith’s The big house for string quartet, Readers may be familiar with this piece through the Ruisi Quartet’s recording on Pentatone, where the piece is preceded by Leith’s 2020 Different Fantasie (which takes Matthew Locke’s Suite No.5 in G as a starting point: publishers Faber Music use quotes around Locke ‘arranged’ by Leith, and one can hear why as the music blends into Leith’s world). Here at the Purcell Room we went in ‘cold’ to Leith’s set of seven pieces on Sir Simon Marsden’s photo book, In Ruins: The Once Great Houses of Ireland. Marsden’s photography is haunting, and predominantly black and white. The music is subtle in that it repeats, but often with differences of tuning, as is the case in the two violins in the first movement (‘The big house’) against monolithic chords in the lower instruments. But the lower instruments crescendo gradually, becoming ever more insistent, aggressive even, while the violins maintain a constant, quiet dynamic. Both layers require different types of control: maintenance in the one instance, careful gradation in the other, both superbly managed by the Manchester Collective (it felt more visceral, certainly, than the Ruisi Quartet’s recording on Pentatone).
Marsden’s buildings are done. They slump; they are shells. Similarly, ‘Blue bottles’ give out desultory, dying sounds, chords that seem unable to settle on one pitch, but instead vibrate while morphing into some sort of funeral procession. This is disturbing music, and the Manchester Collective presents it starkly, its impact emphasised by their lighting. At first glance, ‘Sunshine Choir’ sems a misnomer, until one realises that here are rays of light that seek to peek through the repeated chords. The music seems to breathe and there is a real sense of inhale/exhale. Leith’s response to Marsden is predominantly, if not exclusively, quiet. ‘Cornicing’ begins with a solo line heard in drooping, glissando-ing echo: again, deep skill is required for successful performance and somehow the Manchester Collective players captured the sense of a soul’s keening perfectly (in fairness, the Ruisi recording is excellent, too). Perhaps the most singularly beautiful movement is ‘Home Chapel Organ’, painfully fragile.
Leith plays with multi-layer unisons in ‘Pomegranite’, but also with destabilising glissandos and pitch-bends; a cello sustained note, instead of grounding the experience, destabilises. Finally, ‘Fish, Eggs and Wine,’ where flexible tuning again creates a new soundworld, disturbing, unsettling.
The Ruisi Quartet premiered the work at Wigmore Hall in 2021, and so their recording carries great weight. The sheer control required to perform Leith’s piece well is extraordinary. The Manchester Collective’s performance was unforgettable; the same could apply to a piece by Wunderkind Héloïse Werner, her Piano Quintet (2025). If Leith carves sound out of slowly moving (sometimes rotating) gesture, Werner prefers speed. The five movements of Werner’s Piano Quintet (receiving its London premiere; it had been played in Manchester the previous night) resemble music boxes. Werner, whose own performances revel in visual gesture, uses that here, too: players have to stand then sit, and at times freeze with deliberately rictus grins. They have to sing, a moment of magic, it turns out. There is comedy here, held within a very special musical universe.
Werner is one of the few contemporary young composers who has a recognisable compositional fingerprint coupled with an imagination that is as unique as it is vast. With Leith, one gets an idea of what goes on inside his head; with Werner, we hear the music and wonder what on earth goes on inside her head. It is in a sense humbling to be exposed to such brazen audacity of youth. From the quixotic to the quietly sparkling, Werner’s piece is stunning, and spectacularly intricate: the ‘hidden mechanisms’ of the title are the things we do not see when walking in a forest (one of the sources of inspiration for Werner). Werner metaphorically ‘outs’ those mechanisms into sound: her compositional virtuosity was matched by the instrumental virtuosity of the Manchester Collective, Junyan Chen’s contribution absolutely as one with her colleagues. It is interesting that another piece, inspired by forests and their hidden (in this case mycological) mechanisms is Gavin Higgins’s Horn Concerto. But from a common impulse spring two strong, but very different, pieces.
Cassandra Miller’s piece for string quartet, Leaving, was written in 2011. The title refers to her physical relocation from Canada’s Pacific Coast. Miller often takes identified sound sources and transforms them. Here, she was inspired by the Canadian violinist Zav RT and a deceased violinist, Oliver Schroer. No missing the folkish element to this place of tranquility; a piece absolutely in line with the core ethos of the Manchester Collective.
Finally, Olli Mustonen’s Piano Quintet, written in 2014 (not 2024 as the QR-gatewayed notes claimed). Mustonen is of course a noted virtuoso pianist in his own right, and he writes with great confidence. It is easy to hear Shostakovich in the first movement ‘Drammatico e passionato’, but here are also shadows of Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale. Informed with grand gestures and long, passionate melodies, this is highly tensile music given in a gripping performance. Junyan Chen’s playing was stupendous, whether in the thunderous opening or the chordal, contrasting sections. The central ‘Quasi una passacaglia,’ an Andantino, takes us into the world of the late Shostakovich string quartets. Here, Mustonen dares to create bare textures before embarking on a spectral fugato. The finale begins ‘Misterioso’, the piano exploring each end of its pitch capabilities before settling in the midrange, all around a string lament. This cedes to what I can only call a trippy dance (and I don’t mean untied shoelaces). It really felt as if all players were finally letting their hair down, almost as one might in an encore (there weren’t any). A terrific piece, performed with zest, verve, and total commitment and understanding. Chen is a magnificent pianist, the backbone of this performance. Hers is a name I will actively seek out.
As always, the Manchester Collective impressed. They have thought so deeply about what they represent, and who they represent, and created a programme that verges on immersive experience. No wonder they prefer the communal space of performing in the round (impossible at Purcell Room, of course).
Colin Clarke
Featured Image: Manchester Collective at the Purcell Room