New in this programme by the Frankfurt-based contemporary music group Ensemble Modern were two of three pieces called Manere by Alexander Goehr, heard alongside the first, which was written in 2008.
Goehr is, at 84, still adding to a body of work whose aesthetic parameters are wide ranging, though its density and rigour derive from a European tradition that has always been central to his heritage.
These three pieces – scored for clarinet and violin, clarinet and horn, and then all instruments together – take their title from a Biblical text (John 21: 22) used as the opening of the sequence for the mass associated with the Feast of Saint John the Evangelist: “If it is my will that he remain” – the final word in the Latin being manere.
Their origins in liturgical chant, however, belie their vitality and colour, examples of Goehr’s ability to set individual lines in vigorous competition. Exploiting the resulting creative collisions were the clarinettist Ib Hausmann, violinist Giorgos Panagiotidis and horn player Saar Berger.
A bigger recent work by Goehr proved more diffuse. Verschwindendes Wort (Vanishing Word) sets a selection of German texts (one a translation of Osip Mandelstam) as a 35-minutes cantata in which the mezzo Lucy Schaufer and tenor Christopher Gillett’s fine contributions were interspersed with a series of equally adept instrumental preludes. Conductor Jonathan Berman led a cogent account of a piece that nevertheless felt less consistently compelling than the two modern classics on the programme: Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zeitmasse and Oliver Knussen’s Ophelia Dances.
