The composer Harold Truscott, c1979 (c) Margaret Truscott

Rosie Cow, bassoon; Rosalind Ventris, viola; Laura Jellicoe flute; English Symphony Orchestra / Kenneth Woods

King’s Place, London, March 23^rd, 2025

What prompted Harold Truscott to compose his Elegy, which received its long-overdue London premiere in March, is not recorded. Nor, indeed, are the reasons why he suppressed all knowledge of this highly charged and emotional symphonic adagio all his life. Composed in October 1943, just after Truscott had started attending—as a distraction from wartime night-shift employment in the Post Office—the Royal College of Music as a part-time, adult student, the Elegy sounds less like a memorial than a love-letter, and its inspiration may lie in the break-up at around this time of his long-term engagement to a former student. This is reflected in the music’s vain attempt to cadence from E flat to A flat. (The presence of the note D flat, the sub-dominant of A flat, however, undermines the home key to such an extent that when the Elegy concludes, the simplest tonic chord of E flat major in root position—cellos, violas, second violins—is made to sound unresolved.) Object lesson in tonal handling it undoubtedly is, Kenneth Woods and the strings of the English Symphony Orchestra focussed on the passion in a reading that, with all due to respect to the shade of Gary Brain who first took it up, I suspect is the finest it has ever received.

The Elegy was the second item on the programme, following a vibrant, delightful rendition of Elgar’s Romance in D minor for bassoon and strings (1909-10), composed for the LSO’s principal Edwin James of a century ago and given here by the ESO’s own Rosie Cow. It made a fine upbeat to the Truscott with its wistful atmosphere, inspired perhaps by the then recent deaths of Elgar’s friends August Jaeger (‘Nimrod’) and Basil Nevison, two of the characters featured in the Enigma Variations. If the Elgar set the stage nicely for the Truscott, there was a danger that the Elegy could have overwhelmed the first half’s final piece, Peter Fribbins’ Folk Songs for viola and chamber orchestra (2022), being given its UK premiere. Fortunately, in Rosalind Ventris’ strong performance, splendidly accompanied by the ESO (just flute, bassoon and strings), it quickly created its own expressive space, as a mini-concerto in the form of a Prelude, Fugue and Fantasia as much about the nature of folk music as reworkings of the specific tunes themselves. These, drawn from Wales, Serbia/Macedonia, and Hungary may not have had any specific connections between them, but Fribbins’ sympathetic developments made a marvellous and coherent whole.

Kenneth Woods has always had a genius for intelligent concert programming and proved it once more in the various strands and interconnections between the five works performed. The second half was devoted to scintillating accounts of two major works: Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s First Flute Concerto—spectacularly performed by Laura Jellicoe—and Rudolf Barshai’s searing transcription of Shostakovich’s Tenth Quartet (dedicated to Weinberg), given here under the title Chamber Symphony but named ‘Symphony for strings’ by Barshai. Geographically, the concert opened in the West Country of England with Elgar and Truscott (the Elegy contains a ‘deliberate’ quotation from Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad), before jumping from Wales to Central and South-Eastern Europe with Fribbins to Poland and (Soviet) Russia. Instrumentally, set against the string orchestral texture were the three concertante soloists rising upwards from Elgar’s bassoon through Fribbins’ viola to Weinberg’s lustrous flute. Linking all five works was the pervading sense of poignancy in its many shades from grief and neglect to the personal-political tensions of Cold War Russia. This was simply superb, thought-provoking concert construction, excellently executed.

As Artistic Director Peter Fribbins announced at the start of the concert, this was the final event (after some 400 concerts) in the London Chamber Music Society’s 17-year sojourn at King’s Place. From September, the Society will decamp to St John’s, Waterloo. A memorable concert for oh, so many reasons.