BCMG at Wigmore Hall

Despite its chamber scale – this programme contains an embarrassment of riches, a lucky dip of superbly crafted chamber pieces from the last 30 years, full of contrast, some tiny, some substantial, performed by crack team of BCMG soloists.

Some of these works are memorials or tributes; many use forms or techniques from music of the past – fugues, chaconnes, canons, inventions; some come from a fascination with past composers. Knussen’s Upon one note distorts the rhythms and pitches of Purcell’s five part fantasia, whilst Barry’s two-minute Aeneas and Dido revisits Purcell’s opera as the composer “felt that Aeneas needed to be given his due”.

BCMG gave the world premiere performance of Elliott Carter’s Epigrams at the 2013 Aldeburgh Festival following the composer’s death in November 2012 – the piece being Carter’s last ever work, a piano trio intended for Aldeburgh but left incomplete at his death.

The Adès studies condense and refashion music from his acclaimed opera The Tempest into a single movement for four instruments. The result is a kaleidoscopic succession of musical portraits – each depicting a shipwrecked character on Prospero’s island.