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After the rapport with audience had been set in motion, the players were quick to do the same with one another, opening with what might be described as a C. P. E. Bach ‘patchwork’ sonata, three movements handpicked from his 1770 sonatas for keyboard with clarinet and bassoon accompaniment. However, contrary to this title, it was the two wind instruments that took centre-stage, bringing admirable sensitivity to the respectively buoyant and jaunty outer movements.
The mere 14-year skip to Mozart’s Quintet in E-flat major, K. 452, belay an extensive maturity of the classical style, the composer’s lyricism shining through immediately from the stately Largo introduction. Here all five players could begin to truly capitalise on the inherent warmth of their authentic instruments, each contributing individual flavour to the musical melting pot; Emily Worthington’s mellifluent clarinet provided a perfect foil to Belinda Paul’s oboe as it glided above the ensemble, while Andrew Aaarons extracted inconceivable degrees of range and colour from the fortepiano. The central Larghetto proved an apt showcase for the natural horn, Helen Shillito slicing poignantly through the texture, before the turns of phrase of the final Allegretto allowed room for collective charm, no grace lost despite the resurgence in tempo.
Despite the technical notoriety of period wind instruments, intonation was outstandingly secure throughout the evening, rare blemishes in the Mozart - and in the Mendelssohn Konzertstucke for clarinet, bassoon and piano, that opened the second half - doing nothing to mar the overall effect. In his preamble to the latter, Percival attempted to rationalise the performance of the work on bassoon rather than the originally intended basset horn. He need not have bothered, for there could have been no better justification than the unique character he brought to the bipolar dialogue, romantic sturm und drang juxtaposed with quaint good humour.
However, it was the final work on the programme, Beethoven’s Quintet in E-flat major, Op. 16, that proved to be the main event. Written over a period of four years before its Vienna premiere in 1798, the work emerged as a precursor to the ‘heroic’ style of the composer’s middle-period masterworks, the expanded harmonic language in particular precipitating the grandiose gestures of the symphonies that would soon follow. Accordingly, Ensemble 452 presented a broader palate of emotional colour, the opening movement swinging almost violently between the explosive and the delicate: the voice of gravity one moment, a witty punchline the next. Mozart’s influence became most apparent in the transcendent melodies of the Andante cantabile, but although his fingerprints were also visible in the final Rondo, this was undoubtedly Beethoven’s show, a vigourous gallop leading the evening to a rambunctious conclusion.
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