Distinctive titles are a feature of Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s music, The Madness Industry, How to Win an Election and My Day in Hell among them. Her new clarinet quintet – commissioned by the Presteigne festival where she is a composer-in-residence this year – is Tales of the Invisible. Not so obviously quirky – and suggested by the “invisible psychological borders” referred to by Gazmend Kapllani in the prologue to his A Short Border Handbook – Frances-Hoad’s title signals a piece that explores liminal territory.
The sense is of the clarinet as an outsider on the boundary, a wind instrument set among strings, not a usurper, yet a potentially threatening presence. Their musical exchanges take place outside the comfort-zone, an environment bordering on the hostile. Thus, the opening Andante marks the tentative approaches of clarinet to the fierce strings, the instrument both withdrawn and assertive, and the finale progresses to more lively, if occasionally grudging, gestures of acceptance. It is in the central Largo espressivo, from the clarinet’s first utterance of a simple plaintive melodies to its later impassioned declamatory lines, that the music speaks most persuasively. Rozenn Le Trionnaire and the Albion Quartet played it with much sensitivity.
Far from any basking in the collegiate warmth of Mozart and Brahms’s clarinet quintets, Frances-Hoad’s has the chill of unspoken hostility as well as a certain humanity. It should prove a good foil for the classic works.
This premiere was framed by string quartets by Dvořák and Walton. The Albion brought a gently intimate and introspective quality to Dvořák’s American quartet, usually treated more robustly, but here the understated and unsentimental factor also helped set the stage for Frances-Hoad’s clarinet quintet. The quartet were at their most convincing in Walton’s Quartet in A minor (now called the second after the rediscovery of an early quartet). Colours and textures were beautifully judged, from febrile to mercurial and finally spiky. The writing favours the viola throughout and Ann Beilby’s amber tone made the contemplative Lento particularly eloquent.
• The Presteigne festival continues until 27 August.
