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Nash Ensemble/Brabbins review – Davies, Matthews and Holt take the modern temperature

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Wigmore Hall, London
Two new works and a London premiere, alongside revisits to three other pieces, rode the spectrum from elegant and concise to dark and ruminative

There were three premieres – two world, one a first for London – in the latest edition of the Nash Ensemble’s annual showcase of contemporary British music, as well as return visits to three other pieces premiered by the group, by Huw Watkins, Colin Matthews and Julian Anderson.

The work being introduced to London was Peter Maxwell Davies’s A Sea of Cold Flame, completed in 2015. It proved to be his final setting of George Mackay Brown, whose poetry had been so important in shaping Davies’s music when he first settled in Orkney in the early 1970s. A baritone soloist (Roderick Williams here) is shadowed by a solo cello (Adrian Brendel) and supported by a string quartet, weaving the three Mackay Brown poems, about the harshness of Orkney life, into a continuous sequence, and at one point dissolving into wordless humming of a curiously aimless melody.

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