As part of a frenzied weekend taking in 100 concerts to celebrate the first anniversary of Kings Place, Colin Matthews curated three programmes of music for solo wind and piano by Schumann, Britten and himself, including a new work written for horn virtuoso Richard Watkins and his pianist brother Huw.
Named after its place of composition, Tanglewood Fanfare was a brief but bracing piece that drew on the resonating properties of the piano to enfold bold stabbing notes shared by horn and keyboard, forming a gleaming carillon of bell-like effects, brilliant in colour and striking in its use of gesture and texture.
The Watkins brothers followed it with a fervent account of Britten's Canticle No 3, a setting of Edith Sitwell's poem Still Falls the Rain. Tenor Daniel Norman revealed the troubled interior of the piece in which the horn and piano colluded to create an astringent atmosphere. Britten's arrangement of Schumann's Adagio and Allegro, a rare piece of richly romantic horn writing, restored some semblance of emotional warmth and was superbly achieved by both participants.
The other programmes, given by Huw Watkins with oboist Nicholas Daniel, and by clarinettist Michael Collins with pianist Michael McHale, were equally accomplished. The former pair reprised Matthews's 1991 Duologue, a vital and entertaining piece covering a lot of ground in four small movements, with Daniel also making a solo highlight of Britten's Six Metamorphoses after Ovid. The hall's acoustic shone here, as it did in Collins's expert delivery of Matthews's arrangements of his own Three Studies (originally written as Three Enigmas for cello) and of Britten's surprisingly substantial Mazurka Elegiaca, composed in memory of the pianist and Polish prime minister Ignacy Paderewski.
