Brighton Year-Round 2024
St Nicholas In Memory of Benjamin Cruft
The Cruft Ensemble
Genre: Live Music
Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
The Cruft Ensemble (Patricia Calnan, Manon Derome violins, George Robertson viola, Anthony Pleeth cello) performed a remarkable concert in memory of their founder Benjamin Cruft St Nicholas Church. It was also an act of making strange: the Purcell and Beethoven particularly in arrangements and latterly Beethoven himself.
It would be good to hear far more from this singular ensemble.
The Cruft Ensemble perform a concert in in memory of Benjamin Cruft St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road: Purcell, Bach, Beethoven.
Review
The Cruft ensemble (Patricia Calnan, Manon Derome violins, George Robertson viola, Anthony Pleeth cello) performed a remarkable concert in memory of their founder Benjamin Cruft St Nicholas Church. It was also an act of making strange: the Purcell and Beethoven particularly in arrangements and latterly Beethoven himself.
Calnan joined the ensemble for the Purcell and Bach items, and Derome for the Beethoven, so there were always just three players on stage, the classical string trio.
Purcell’s 15 Fantazias were written in 1680, the last composed by August 31st 11 days before his newly-deduced 21st birthday. The last of the In Nomine tradition stretching back to John Taverner in the 1530s,, they cap that pantheon of great British instrumental music in the genre.
Cruft chose to arrange the first the for string trio, thus modernising them a many have done up to the 1950s when period instruments bean to reassert themselves. Pleeth himself is a period-performing cellist and brings his own awareness of period performance.
Nevertheless the very curious harmonies both traditional and Purcell’s own ensure these rapt time-travelling capsules of a practice old in Purcell’s time – they were possibly never performed and an exercise in virtuosity and affirmation by the young composer – shows how wondrously out of time the are. The ensemble felt particularly inside their tightly woven inner parts, coming to a climax in the third and last with its final release still in the minor.
Bach’s Trio in E minor BWV528 is another act of transposition, though one that Bach above all understood: he was continually doing it to himself and others. What the Crufts do here is to point out the inner parts as bright and sharp whereas the old continuo part is given thrubbing authority in Pleeth’s cello and more to do. Like Purcell, there’s some loss of the off-centre timbre, but Bach as ever seems designed for transposition and after the fist movements the fugue makes a bid at the home minor with an elegant peroration.
The Beethoven String Trio in C minor Op 9 No. 3 now with Derome as violinist, is the one not needing arrangement: but it’s the oddest. The Crufts bring out the extraordinary beating heart of the slow movement, but in the scherzo they don’t hold back from its frankly weird sonorities. It’s a revelation, refusing to smooth over te sheer quiddity of Beethoven’s sonorities. The finale is different again, a wisp-like serenade finale, lighter and almost insouciant having explored the C minor depths.
This is a remarkable concert. It would be good to hear far more from this singular ensemble. Benjamin Crufts and his aesthetic are missed, but not here where sheer musicality above all abides.
