On 22 May Ensemble 360 are joined by Claire Booth for voice and ensemble works by Colin Matthews and Oliver Knussen. A matinee performance at the Crucible Theatre sees Booth perform Matthews’ Seascapes – a 13-minute setting of Sidney Keyes for voice and ensemble – and Knussen’s Whitman Settings, in its version for voice and piano.
Seascapes is cast in five movements, scored for a dark-hued group of nine instruments: alto flute, oboe, bass clarinet, horn, harp, piano, violin, viola, and cello. Matthews sets poems from Keyes’ war years – all but one from the final year of his life – that match the ensemble’s gloomy timbre in their mood, which have an intensity of focus, visionary quality, and seriousness redolent of the prophetic poems of Rilke and Yeats. Its music suggests surging seas, nocturnal estuaries, and dark premonitions, and memories of the past.
It premiered with Nash Ensemble and Booth in 2021 at Wigmore Hall, with soprano and ensemble returning to the work in March 2023, spotlighting Matthews’ longstanding artistic relationship with the group. Seascapes will appear on a forthcoming album of Matthews’ works for voice and ensemble with Nash, Booth, as well as baritone Marcus Farnsworth and conductor Jessica Cottis; the album will be released by Onyx at the end of May 2026.
Knussen’s 10-minute Whitman Settings were originally composed for voice and piano in 1991, prior to their reworking as a set of immaculately coloured orchestral songs. Knussen sets four emphatic poems by Whitman that deal with grand natural phenomena on unusually compact canvases for the poet, all concerned with phenomena of space and sky: ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’, ‘A Noiseless Patient Spider’, ‘The Dalliance of the Eagles’, and ‘The Voice of the Rain’. Booth has performed both versions of the cycle over the last two decades, appearing with the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Norrköpings Symfoniorkester, Ensemble Recherche, and pianists Ryan Wigglesworth and Christopher Glynn.
In the evening a further concert sees Ensemble 360 turn to Knussen’s 1992 work for mixed ensemble Songs without Voices. Knussen said of the 11-minute piece for flute, cor anglais, clarinet, horn, violin, viola, cellos and piano:
Over the past few years I recovered an old enthusiasm for writing songs, and it occurred to me to try to apply this to the instrumental sphere. Three of the present pieces are, literally, songs without voice – that is, a complete poem is ‘set’ syllable for instruments in the course of a movement; and one is from a more private lyrical impulse – a cor anglais melody written upon hearing of the death of Andrzej Panufnik, a person I much admired.