Pärnu friends reunited

Not all at once, mind you. Musicians I got to know, to a greater or lesser degree, at the Pärnu Festival (first report of three to date here) are playing, or have played, in various events spanning just over a week as follows: clarinettist Matt Hunt and bassoonist Amy Harman in one of Ensemble 360's Wigmore concerts (not Matt, alas, in the second, which I caught on Sunday morning - though there he is below, anyway, with Amy as pictured by top Estonian photographer Kaupo Kikkas - they've given duo programmes too), violinist Ben Baker and cellist-conductor Jonathan Bloxham, our Europe Day 2017 duo, at Kings Place; still to come, Estonian Festival Orchestra leader Florian Donderer with Christian Tetzlaff and company next Sunday, and horn-player Alec Frank-Gemmill with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra winds the following lunchtime.

Pictured up top are Ben, Jonathan and Ben's regular duo partner Daniel Lebhardt. Their Sunday evening concert at Kings Place, held under the auspices of the London Chamber Music Society, was a showcase for the astounding chamber music to be heard at Jonathan's Northern Chords Festival. The addition for the third of three great works was viola-player Eivind Holtsmark Ringstad (pictured below by Nikolaj Lund), whose playing first impressed me when he was introduced by Leif Ove Andsnes at the Dulwich Picture Gallery as one of two outstanding young Norwegian performers. His first CD is just out, of the Walton and Sinding viola concertos - can't wait to hear it.

He had, relatively speaking, the easiest deal of the evening, Ben and Daniel the toughest since they played in all three works - and the piano parts in both the rippling Mendelssohn Second Piano Trio and Brahms's G minor Piano Quartet are absolute killers; Lebhardt hardly seemed to break a sweat as he played with both weight and total clarity, sounding fabulous in Kings Place acoustics and never overpowering the strings (and oh, those light rapid runs in Brahms's Rondo alla zingarese!). In both the enigma of Janáček's Violin Sonata, the elusive ideal fading to a ghost voice, and the Mendelssohn uncannily perfect movement endings and transitions were the signs of absolute mastery, chamber musical playing of the highest order. And the articulate energy could take the breath away in the two tidal waves of Mendelssohn's opening movement as well as the fairy music of his scherzo. The arrival of the chorale in the finale is always such a great moment, too - shall never forget how it followed on the heels of the muezzin's call to evening prayers in an open-air concert at the D-Marin Festival in Turkey the summer before last.

With Brahms, it's the barline-dissolving genius of his unique songs without words that I get to love ever more; the greatest miracle in that respect, shared between Lebhardt and strings, is the Intermezzo's second melody which breaks into laughing triplets. But the revelation of the day was the Andante, un poco adagio of the Piano Quintet as played in the Wigmore morning coffee concert by - yes, these superb artists in Ensemble 360's army of generals all have to be named - Benjamin Nabarro, Claudia Ajmone-Marson, Ruth Gibson, Gemma Rosenfeld (pictured above, I think, also by Kaupo) and Tim Horton. This is a song that just goes on into seeming infinity, and its little adornments make the heart leap. Another one you can play at my funeral. I must have heard the work before, because I remember the vintage Brahms shadowy/big-boned scherzo; but the performance can't have been anywhere near as good as this otherwise the slow movement would have been carved on my heart back then.

No less miraculous is Martinů's Nonet. The more I hear of his huge output, the more I'm in awe: is there actually a dud? Certainly not among the later pieces, and this one is vintage in its wavering between major and minor tonality, the harmonic no-man's-lands, the sudden shafts of sunlight which quickly go behind the clouds (especially in the emotional slow movement).

The above photo looks like it must be of the Nonet, but of course with Matt playing clarinet rather than Tim Orpen (the other musicians not so far encountered are double-bassist Laurène Durantel, very much the central underpinner, oboist Adrien Wilson and horn-player Naomi Atherton). Apparently the Estonian Festival Orchestra's international treasure had had to fly off in the small hours after Saturday evening's concert, which I had to miss in favour of the musically less rich LPO Stravinsky launch. That did at least mean that I got a double helping of the sublime Juliette Bausor, recently appointed the orchestra's principal flute, and a better is not to be found anywhere (though Philharmonia principal Samuel Coles was also amazing in Paavo Järvi's Thursday Dvořák).

In a serendipitous footnote - which I hope didn't come across to our flautist as potential stalking - I'd brought along a second-edition copy of Martinu's Julietta in the Supraphon recording for my concert companion David Thompson  (I already have the original CD format). He'd bought it only a couple of weeks earlier, so I thought - Juliette/Julietta for Juliette Bausor? Why not, as a tribute to the exquisite playing? And she was very gracious and natural about accepting it, didn't seem to think me weird at all. Anyway, I was careful not to outstay my welcome in the Green Room, but quickly took my leave after exchanging a few words with Amy. The main point is that I've now heard Ensemble 360 for the first time - resident as they are in South Yorkshire, we don't get to witness them much down south - and it was love at first sight-and-sound.

Andsnes, Astrup and other Norwegians

Had my Arts Desk say on the first of two programmes given by Leif Ove Andsnes (pictured above overlooked by Gainsborough ladies) and two young Norwegian musicians at the Dulwich Picture Gallery; handed over to Gavin Dixon for the second, and he did an excellent job (which means I agree with him). But I couldn't resist going back for the daytime recital, partly because I'd fallen in love with that amazing gallery again and wanted to sit with Soane's provision for natural light from above having its full effect.

On the first evening, I sat myself right alongside Van Dyck's Samson and Delilah, one of my favourite pictures in the gallery along with the three Rembrandts and a Claude.

Tuesday lunchtime was a chance to sit on the other side, so not looking towards the male nudes as in this photo of violinist Guro Kleven Hagen,

but in the opposite direction, with a whole other clutch of pictures around me. Hearing both programmes gave the opportunity to appreciate the perfect symmetries of the programming, made by Andsnes in conjunction with the cultural wing of the Savings Bank Foundation DNB - a very enlightened collaboration responsible for both the majority of the Nikolai Astrup paintings in the current exhibition and the valuable instruments on loan to Hagen and viola player Eiving Holtsmark Ringstad.

The highlight of the second concert, for me, was Ringstad's performance with Andsnes of Sinding's Suite in the Old Style: the first movement a virtual moto perpetuo in which Ringstad dropped no stitch and made musical sense of virtuosity, the second a chance to return to the dark brooding to which the viola is so suited. Diffident in person, Ringstad comes alive as a performer, a good foil to the more reserved musicianship of Hagen. As for Andsnes' inclusion of four of Grieg's many Lyric Pieces, I ordered up the disc of his performances recorded on Grieg's Steinway in the house at Troldhaugen (a pairing of man and piano which, of course, I was uniquely privileged to experience for myself in the realms of Kurtág and Liszt during last summer's trip to Bergen).

Delighted as I was to receive these photos from Dulwich Picture Gallery's press department a week after the event, I felt just a bit miffed that they hadn't taken up my suggestion to photograph the three musicians in the Astrup exhibition's final room of midsummer bonfires. The best I can do is an illicit picture of the crowds in that room - like the Norwegians, I was amazed to see so many of Astrup's flaming canvases gathered together in one space, and there were no postcards of this splendid group.

Many of these pictures I saw for the first time last summer in one of Bergen's superb KODE galleries, in a new wing specially devoted to the master; mostly denuded in the cause of the Dulwich exhibition, the biggest of Astrup's work to be shown anywhere in the world, it currently has a special display devoted to the artist's early works.

What most struck me then and, in much more detail now, was the special quality of Astrup's woodcuts. Like Munch, who bought several of his early works, Astrup proved something of a pioneer here - in fact, more so. He not only painted on his wood blocks, but also on the finished prints. He writes almost self-reproachfully about his 'experimentation', continuing:

I work in my own way, and several of my impressions can appear to be more paintings than woodcuts and this is, of course, really a fault - that is also why I have not considered exhibiting them. Some of them also require a lot of work to print, as I use 5-6 blocks for each impression.

He chose his paper carefully, linking it to his environment - he liked the Kazo of inspirational Japanese example, long-fibred stuff from the paper mulberry tree - and alder was the preferred tree for his blocks, though he also used pear and pinewood.

The Dulwich exhibition gives in some instances four different versions of the same scene, infinitely sensitive to the tones and changing seasons of the small area above Bergen where Astrup worked and lived for most of his life. In a rare move to please a patron fond of the marsh marigolds which feature in some of his most famous images, he reworked Night Ploughing, c.1905

to include the plant in 1927 where the water had been.

An assemblage of no less than four woodcuts of The Moon in May, 1908, which I can only suggest in their entirety from two pages of the excellent catalogue

range from an idyllic scene with two people working in the garden

to what looks like a snowy landscape with a very thick application of paint.

As for the joyous midsummer bonfire images, one famous oil with lovers, dancers and fiddler

exists both as colour woodcut in several versions

and in black-and-white, making the fiddler look like Old Nick - after all, Astrup's pastor father thought these rituals were the work of the devil.

You can see why these images are a source of no small fascination, and I'll certainly return to Dulwich before the exhibition ends on 15 May (if you want to see it after that you'll have to travel to Norway or Germany).

What ought to be more than a footnote but which finds itself squeezed in here by virtue of its link to an unusual concert in a special place has to be the second of the Waterloo Warehouse concerts organised and conducted by the ever-enterprising Jonathan Bloxham (all donations, as before to MOAS, Migrant Offshore Aid Station - and as I promised I gave all savings on Christmas cards and stamps to them as well, though a little miffed not to have had the barest acknowledgment. Anyway the transfer went through). I'm being totally honest when I say that Ben Baker's interpretation of the Beethoven Violin Concerto with the orchestra of students and young professionals was the most arresting I've ever heard. Here he is with Jonathan after the performance.

Told an exhausted J he might be able to doze at some point during the Beethoven - I often do, if only mentally - but he had cause to reproach me jovially for never at any point being able to do so. Jonathan paced the central movement just right - more a stately dance than a bland wallow - and Ben, peerless in musicianship and intonation as ever, chose the fiendish cadenzas adapted by Christian Tetzlaff from the version Beethoven made for piano and orchestra, celebrated for having timps to dialogue with the soloist at one point.

The Brahms One which followed was way too big for the modest surroundings, but a flexible and impassioned interpretation with real extra dynamism in the finale, where you noticed all the more how the themes just keep pouring out of Brahms in highest inspiration. This was just as fascinating an approach in its way as Ticciati's with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.  Jonathan tells me he is up for the post of assistant conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and he deserves to get it.