The cellist Natalie Clein headed this programme in the series Venus Unwrapped, an imaginatively conceived year-long celebration of women composers.
Least familiar was the Dutch pianist and composer Henriëtte Bosmans, a bisexual with a bohemian lifestyle rather more adventurous than her music would suggest. Her 1919 Cello Sonata, late Romantic in idiom, was worth resurrecting, though unlikely to displace the acknowledged masterpieces of the genre.
Clein’s partner for this and the Debussy Cello Sonata was the accomplished pianist Matan Porat, whose virile playing somewhat ruffled the tranquil surface of the evening.
Five late songs of Robert Schumann, spare in texture, introverted in mood, elicited more sentient playing from Julius Drake that ideally complemented the control and refinement exhibited by soprano Ruby Hughes.
They were joined by Clein in evocative accounts of Berlioz’s La Captive and a song, Les Etoiles, by Pauline Viardot (1803–69).
Judith Weir’s On the Palmy Beach, receiving its world premiere, is a quietly quixotic setting of poems by Wallace Stevens and Emily Dickinson, among others, all with marine resonances and inspiring a tasteful and touching response from this most inventive of composers.
Clein, Hughes and Drake perfectly caught the element of whimsy and were equally in rapturous communion in the autumnal op. 91 songs of Brahms.
Venus Unwrapped continues until Dec 20 (kingsplace.co.uk)
