It’s amazing what can change in three-quarters of an hour. This short lunchtime concert at Wigmore Hall presented some remarkable music in superb performances: the known, the lesser-known and the (probably) unknown. But it was hearing Eleonore Cockerham in solo mode that was the true revelation: once a member of VOCES8, she now shines as soloist. She emerged as one of the finest young talents on the stage today; her contribution was faultless from every perspective.
It was also good to see the Manchester Camerata (or members thereof) off home turf: I honestly believe the last time I heard this group was as part of a Hallé concert series at the Free Trade Hall on February 1, 1981, with Haydn’s ‘Nelson’ Mass preceded by Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ Symphony and a Handel Concerto grosso (HWV 322): 44 years ago, by my reckoning. Nice, also, to see Benjamin Powell on piano: last seen (again in my experience) as part of the recording sessions for the much-missed Psappha Composing for … sessions.
The repertoire seems to have expanded a bit to the present; and what a treat this was. The Camerata on this occasion was some 13 players.
Two (relatively) familiar pieces framed the concert. First, Stravinsky’s Three Japanese Lyrics. Stravinsky selected his text from an anthology of Chinese poetry translated into Russian. The scoring nods to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire: flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, piano and string quartet. “Akahito” brought forth perfectly balanced woodwind and fine, forthright projection from the soprano. Stravinsky’s world, caught between himself and japonaiserie while nodding in the woodwind unisons to passages from the infamous Rite, is consistently fascinating. And yet, he holds us at a remove; as did, rightly, this performance. “Mazatsumi” is fast and furious, and glittering: superb clarinet and piano here (Emily Crook and Powell). Marked Tranquillo, the concluding “Tsaraiuki” seems to move towards a sort of proto-serialist and yet lyrical space. Cockerham’s delivery of cantabile disjunct lines was superb, as assured as any of her instrumental colleagues, while the batonless Jack Sheen ensured the character of each song shone through.
British-Canadian composer Isabella Gellis (born 1997: website) might be best known for a work for the London Symphony Orchestra, Opera for Orchestra (YouTube link). Here, it was the 2021 piece I wish I could speak to you, to a text by Dan Soclu, that was in the spotlight. Cockerham’s contribution was of preternatural clarity and purity; Gellis seems to deliberately merge the voice with the instruments so that Cockerham sometimes became just one strand in an egalitarian texture. The piece is a miracle of concision of thought; and I wonder if the idea of a tapestry was inspired by this line from Soclu’s text: ‘in the evening you’d paint / or weave’? Perhaps: the piece is beautiful and skilfully written for these small forces. There is a performance of I wish I could speak to you on Soundcloud here for soprano and piano, where Lotte Betts-Dean is joined by pianist Joseph Havlat, which gives a flavour, but the Wigmore Hall experience was decidedly more entrancing.
Written in 1912, (the Wigmore freesheet gave 1914, which is the year of publication) the Quatre poèmes hindous offers a glimpse into the world of Maurice Delage (1879-1961). Delage travelled to India in 1911, and four cities are encapsulated in Impressionist song: ‘Madras: Une belle’; ‘Lahore: Une sapin isolé’; ‘Bénares: Naissance de Bouddha’; and ‘Jeypur: Si vous pensez à elle’. In some ways reaching over to the closing Ravel, the piece offers a subtle marriage of Impressionism and Orientalisme. The opening flute of ‘Madras” might imply Debussy’s faun, but ‘Lahore’ found Hannah Roberts on cello bending pizzicatos in a remarkably sitar-like way (Delage based the line on an improvisation by Ustad Imdad Khan). ‘Lahore’ is a setting of a Heine poem, a poem of longing (a lonely fir tree dreams of a palm tree, far away in the East). Cockerham gave us not only superb sense of line, but also silky-smooth vocalise (the movement includes closed-mouth singing). On to Benares: initial French Impressionism cedes to Indian mode-inflected woodwind lines, a cor anglais as snake charmer, perhaps. Finally, Jaipur, shimmering in the heat. A terrific performance of a terrific piece.
Jack Sheen (born 1993) was an expressive conductor throughout, clearly boasting deep knowledge of each score. None more so, perhaps, than his own Hollow popranolol séance II (2021, a piece commissioned by Wigmore Hall, in collaboration with Britten Sinfonia). Some might have come across Sheen’s haunting (no pun/link intended) 2016 piece Lung (recorded on the LSO Live’s Panufnik Legacies IV). Here, he takes his inspiration from an abandoned office block in central Manchester, which was the home for the full version of his piece: an installation in which performers cycled through the music as listeners/audience wandered around what Sheen calls a ‘cavernous post-industrial space’. Sheen attempts to ‘conjure – however fleetingly or ambiguously – some kind of presence out of the fragile whirring that we hear in our empty rooms’. It is an ‘attempt to orchestrate physical vacancy’. Whether it is a song is another matter: as Sheen himself says, ‘the song form here is almost void, flickering in the final moments of the music’. And flicker the music does, an active flute against contemporary done. Perhaps the strumming cello hearkened back to the Delage; but it was taken for a very different walk into quiet but ever-bustling surface. This piece is absolutely hypnotising: you can hear a performance on Soundcloud here, or get a video flavour of the installation experience via Vimeo here.
Finally, back to the known with Ravel’s Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé of 1913. Gloriously rarefied music, Ravel’s heart was captured by the members of the Manchester Camerata right from the tissue-delicate arpeggiations of the opening bars. Cockerham’s delivery of the line was, rightly, ultra-smooth; how effective, too, her blanching of voice at the word ‘angélique’. Perhaps only instrumentally, the final chord here needed a touch of attention; endings are as important as beginnings, be they song, or note, endings. Cockerham’s attack on the initial ‘Princesse!’ of ‘Plact futile’ was exemplary, her delivery so clean; later, Sheen encouraged a slow, sultry dance towards the end of the second stanza, and a lovely shift of harmonic and emotional territory for the song’s final couplet. Finally, ‘Surgi de l croupe et du bond’, the instrumental contribution so carefully prepared in the overlappings of the opening. Again, there was a lovely shift, here inter-stanza (between the first two). Powell beautifully implied distant bells in his contribution, while later a voice-clarinet-voice exchange was absolutely seamless. The close disappeared into nothing: a memorable end to a memorable concert.
Colin Clarke
Igor Stravinsky – Three Japanese Lyrics. Isabelle Gellis – I wish I could speak to you. Maurice Delage – Quatre poèmes hindus. Jack Sheen – Hollow propanalol séance. Maurice Ravel – Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallamé.
Eleonore Cockerham (soprano); Manchester Camerata; Jack Sheen (conductor)
Wigmore Hall, London, 18 October 2025
Top image courtesy of Manchester Camerata