United Kingdom Jacob, Poulenc, Stravinsky: RWCMD Chamber Winds / Robert Plane (conductor). Dora Stoutzker Hall, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, 24.10.2025. (GPu)
Gordon Jacob – Old Wine in New Bottles
Poulenc – Sonata for Two Clarinets
Stravinsky – Octet
Music lovers in South Wales are well served by the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff. A particular attraction is the series of lunchtime concerts, for which tickets usually cost between £6 and £10; concerts begin at 1.15pm and generally finish around 2pm, or very soon after. I know several people working in Cardiff who time their lunchbreak to be able to come to these concerts. Performers in the current season include oboist Nicholas Daniel and cellist Jacob Shaw, as well as concerts such as this one, given by a student ensemble from the college, conducted by Robert Plane – for some twenty years principal clarinet of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and now Head of Woodwind Performance at RWCMD.
RWCMD Chamber Winds opened their programme with Gordon Jacob’s Old Wine in New Bottles, an engaging suite of short pieces composed in 1959 and premiered at the St. Bees Music Festival (in Cumbria) in the same year. It is in four brief movements, each an arrangement of an old English folk song – (i) ‘Wraggle Taggle Gypsies’, (ii) ‘The Three Ravens’, (iii) ‘Begone, Dull Care’ and (iv) ‘Early One Morning’. In each case the original melody is played straight and is always easily recognisable, but is heard within, as it were, a more ‘modern’ framework – hence the title of the suite, the tunes being the ‘old wine’ and Jacob’s settings for the traditional tunes being the ‘new bottles’.
Old Wine in New Bottles made an excellent ‘overture’ (of a kind) for this concert, with its attractively miscellaneous programme. Like most of Jacob’s work it is neat and well-made music, with a clear structure, which invites the performers to enjoy themselves and make the most of the folk tunes. From the jaunty rhythms of the opening of the ‘Wraggle Taggle Gypsies’ it was clear that this student ensemble – made up of 2 flutes (Lauren Rose and Charlotte Holmes, doubling on piccolo), 2 oboes (Ellen Wilkinson and Tom Warner), two clarinets (Raphael Hitchen and Rita Fedista), two bassoons (Hugh Sergeant and Wendy Lloyd), two saxophones (Ed Thompson and Lio Hamasaki) and two trumpets (Katy Rennie and Holly Baker) – was relished by those who were performing it, and the audience was certainly ready to share their pleasure.
Throughout the balance between instruments was impressive, the texture being enriched by the presence of two non-woodwind instruments, the two trumpets played (very well) by Rennie and Baker. The final piece in the suite – the rousing ‘Early One Morning’, with its reminder – even in this purely instrumental form – of the maiden who fears that her lover is about to abandon her, was quite moving.
The second piece on the programme was Poulenc’s Sonata for Two Clarinets, composed in 1918 – almost exactly 50 years before Jacob’s Old Wine in New Bottles – it is, to simplify, mildly acidic, where Jacob’s work might be called comfortable. (which I do not employ as a negative term). It is in three movements: Presto – Andante – Vif, vite, avec joie. The title phrase, ‘for two clarinets’, conceals the fact that it is written for two versions of the instrument: a clarinet in A and the B-flat instrument. The A-flat instrument is pitched a half-step lower than B-flat. Here Hitchen played the A-flat clarinet and Fedista the B-flat.
The sonata is a mere 6-7 minutes or so in performance but contains several challenging elements for those performing it. So, for example, the opening Presto contains a passage in which the two clarinettists are required, simultaneously, to play in different time signatures. There are some wide melodic leaps for both musicians in the second and third movements. As was often the case in Poulenc’s writing for woodwinds, the score makes use of 32nd notes and double-dotted rhythms. The long melodic line of the second movement is a test of the B-flat clarinettist’s stamina. It is a tribute to Fedista and Hitchen to record that none of these difficulties derailed their performance at any of these moments. They enjoyed – and shared their enjoyment of – Poulenc’s wit and harmonic sharpness.
The programme closed with a work which in some respects marked the beginning of twentieth-century neoclassicism, Stravinsky’s Octet, composed in 1922/23 and revised in 1952. Its three movements are marked Sinfonia (Lento), Tema con variazioni and Finale. This attractive reading was given by the flute of Rose, the clarinet of Hitchen, the bassoons of Sergeant and Lloyd, supplemented by the trumpets of Rennie and Baker, the trombone of Emily Collet and the bass trombone of Noah Cory. Several critics were disappointed by the premiere of the Octet (conducted by the composer) in the Paris Opera House in October 1923, describing it as, for example, ‘a mess of eighteenth-century mannerisms’; Jean Cocteau, who was in the audience, reported that the work met with a ‘scandal of silence’. Stravinsky’s change of direction (stylistically and formally) was clearly too abrupt for many. It may have been such reactions which prompted Stravinsky to write a brief, two-page essay on the piece – published as ‘Some Ideas about my Octuor’ (The Arts 5 (January-June 2024).
This short essay opens trenchantly ‘My octuor is a musical object’, and later passages develop the implications of this statement: ‘The reasons why I composed this kind of music for an octuor of flute, clarinet, bassoons, trumpets and trombones are the following: first, because this ensemble forms a complete sonorous scale and consequently furnishes me with a sufficiently rich register; second, because the difference of the volume of these instruments renders more evident the musical architecture [….] Form, in my music derives from counterpoint.’ This brief essay is very illuminating, and I suspect that the attention of this student ensemble had been drawn to it by Robert Plane, given the manner of the performance.
At no point was the music given any kind of excessive characterisation or expressiveness, it was played ‘straight’, as it were, with restraint and fidelity to the score. Almost throughout the ensemble playing was impeccably accurate (though towards the end there were a few very minor lapses in this regard – which I would put down to some tiredness at the end of a fairly challenging concert. Stravinsky’s set of variations in the second movement (Andantino) is impressive and effective, especially the ‘waltz’ in the fourth variation and the fugato (variation 7) and these passages were well presented; so were the syncopated rhythms in the Finale. Some touches of subtlety which one hears in performances by experienced professional ensembles, such as the Eastman Wind Ensemble and Eastman Virtuosi (on AVIE AV 2277) were perhaps missing, but that is to invoke an inappropriate standard of comparison/judgement. Taken on its own terms, this was – like the rest of the programme – a performance which these student performers could (and should) be proud of.
Glyn Pursglove