When he’s not blundering into the discussion of why international conducting remains such a boys’ club, Bruno Mantovani is director of the Paris Conservatoire and a prolific composer. His Carnaval for clarinet, piano and cello, commissioned in part by the Wigmore Hall, was premiered by Ensemble Intercontemporain, and the bracing expertise of their playing deserved more than this enthusiastic but half-empty audience.
The opening is striking. Uncomfortably high clarinet and cello notes scythe through the air, bending into ever crazier trills and cascades, until finally the piano drops anchor with a low chord. Then it is the piano that takes over, its shimmering figures moving from stasis to agitation. All this sets up an opposition between the piano and the other instruments that continues to the end of the work. At 25 minutes it is slightly overlong, and the piano seems undistinctive when left to play alone, but the writing for clarinet and cello has an explosive, experimental energy. One episode, with clarinettist Jérôme Comte and cellist Eric-Maria Couturier shearing away from and then returning to a single note, was so deftly done that it seemed there was another, hidden instrument on the platform sustaining the drone.
The programme was unsweetened by anything normally found in anybody’s comfort zone. Dallapiccola’s Due Studi for violin and piano began with a lyrical dialogue in which the solemn sarabande rhythm, initially played by violinist Hae-Sun Kang alone, inevitably recalled Bach. The second study, though, was all strident piano chords and eeyoring violin, brilliantly played and relentless.
Any composer wanting to create heightened intensity with small forces will have worshipped at the shrine that is Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. This presentation, with Salomé Haller perched in a conventional concert-platform semi-circle with the others, didn’t quite work visually, but aurally it was a treat. Haller gave us a tour de force, her delivery highly characterised, her moonstruck vocalisation ranging from baroque-opera purity to a cabaret drawl to a frustrated, grotesque growl.
