The first work to come from Helen Grime’s composer residency at Wigmore Hall is a Piano Concerto for her husband, composer-pianist Huw Watkins, and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group. It’s a compact work of glittering sonorities carefully applied, with a hectic finale that explodes and then vanishes into thin air. Another composer, looking back to Debussy, might have called it Fireworks.
They might not have called it a concerto. While it certainly demands virtuosic display from the pianist – something Watkins supplied with assurance – the focus is shared between all seven players. Really it’s a delicately wrought chamber piece – like A Cold Spring, the intricately textured work Grime wrote for the BCMG eight years ago, programmed alongside it here.
In the new work, the piano is at least always in the lead, dispatching flourishes that set up kaleidoscopic resonances in the harp and tuned percussion. A pair of woodwinds – flute and clarinet – duet off stage; a pair of onstage strings – violin and cello – dampen their enthusiasm. The winds join the others on stage for a slow movement of relative stillness, before the third movement erupts.
Like A Cold Spring, the Piano Concerto is a demonstration of Grime’s ability to create dense and fascinating textures with the utmost economy, something that will surely flourish in the intimacy of the Wigmore.
Grime had a like-minded conductor in Oliver Knussen, whose characteristically revealing programme put her work alongside her inspirations, including Elliott Carter’s skittish Triple Duo, with its paired-up instruments, and Boulez’s shining Dérive 1.
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