Rochdale Music Society concert: Pomegranate Trio

Pomegranate Trio

Rochdale Music Society aims to provide the borough with concerts of great music performed by great artists, but the visit of the Pomegranate Trio to St. Michael’s Church, Bamford, certainly surpassed that aim. The three musicians who make up the group, Fenella Barton (violin), Rebecca Hepplewhite (cello) and Andrew West (piano), have formidable pedigrees, and came together to perform with a masterly display of artistic perception and technical accomplishment.

It was such an evening of music making of the highest standards, displaying to the full music’s capacity to delight and thrill, that I find it difficult to say anything more than that it was an exceptional experience - one for those who were there to treasure. Such was the audience’s enthusiastic appreciation of each item in the programme that I am embolden to use such language of unreserved approval!

The concert on 15 October began with the Trio written in his late teenage years (1880) by Claude Debussy. This shows the emerging talent of a composer who was going to go on to produce masterpieces in his own way, freed from the constraints of German composers, like Wagner, whose exploitation of chromaticism did not suit a free spirited and super talented Frenchman. In terms of programming it proved the perfect way to begin a concert of three Trios representing the height of late Romantic Gallic achievement in this field: tuneful, wayward at times, always inventive, colourful and warm.

Fauré’s Trio, which came next, was among the last works he completed (1923-4). It is the work of an old master whose mind is still a rich store of imaginative and inventive ideas. From the unassuming tunefulness of its opening bars through the equally deceptive melodic phrasing of the middle movement to its to its spectacularly straightforward final bars it engages the listener and performer alike in a display of melodic phrases, harmonic progressions and rhythmic twists that are captivating and convincing in a most masterly way. The performers knew this, and showed how it works out in a fine performance.

In any concert of piano trios that by Ravel is likely to stand out as a tour de force for the players. At the time of its writing (1913-14) Ravel was at the height of his career, already armed with the most outrageously demanding calls on those who were to perform his solo piano and other chamber music. This kind of music obliges the players to use the whole of body to be fully engaged in achieving the results he envisages. It is a challenge almost impossible to describe to anyone who has not held a violin swaying in their arms, been seated with a cello cradled between their knees or a piano sited at hands length in front of them. To have any chance of a satisfying performance you must become immersed in Ravel’s musical world with its ebb and flow of the most delicate, dramatic, distant and/or disturbing sonorities and enjoy the privilege of being there.

For the listener it is something to be grateful for, and to find in it such spiritual uplift as will linger long after the air has ceased to vibrate with the waves of its musical messaging. The audience on this occasion rightly marvelled at the vast range of entrancing and mind haunting sonorities produced in such a short time by just three musicians - acting under the composer’s orders, of course!

Rochdale Music Society’s next concert will take place on Saturday, 19 November at 7.30pm in St. Michael’s Church, Bamford, when brothers Oscar (violin) and Barney (piano) Tabor will play a wide range of solos and duets by Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Massenet and Chopin among others.

Full details on the Music Society website www.rochdalemusicsociety.org.

Graham Marshall