The Schubert Ensemble have been plying their trade for 35 years, the last 23 with an unchanged lineup, but they have decided that the current season will be their last. They will give their final concert in June, but this was their farewell to London. A near-capacity audience, including quite a number who may well have been at their first concert all those years ago, gave them a warm sendoff.
The programme stuck to the recipe that has proved so successful for the group for so long – an established, well-loved work alongside something heard less often, and something brand new. Since the ensemble was created by five musicians brought together to play Schubert’s Trout Quintet, that was the obvious choice for the classic. Their performance of it had that comforting sense of utter familiarity and gentle wit, even though a bit more assertiveness might have been appropriate in the first and third movements.
The rarity was Chausson’s Piano Quartet. It’s a hefty chunk of French late Romanticism, which pays its debts to Brahms and Dvořák, Franck, Fauré and Debussy, all lit up by luminous harmony; but it requires exactly the firm structural grip brought to it here. The novelty came from Judith Weir, whose association with the Schubert Ensemble goes back to its earliest days. Her tribute, A Song of Departure, took Schubert’s Abschied, the Rellstab setting from Schwanengesang, as the starting point for tiny meditations for each of the five members of the group in turn. It managed to be both authentically Schubertian and entirely Weirian at the same time.
