REVIEW: debut performance from Piacere Piano Quintet in Bognor Regis

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REVIEW BY Richard Amey: Piacere Piano Quintet concert at Regis Music School, Bognor, on Sunday 17 November 2024. Susie Renshaw piano, Inna Erskine and Connie Chatwin violins, Emily Hester viola, Sarah Carvalho-Dubost cello.

Piacere Piano Quintet concert at Regis Music School, Bognor, on Sunday 17 November 2024. Susie Renshaw piano, Inna Erskine and Connie Chatwin violins, Emily Hester viola, Sarah Carvalho-Dubost cello.

Samuel Coleridge Taylor, Piano Quintet in G minor Op1; Camille Saint-Saëns, Piano Quintet No 1 in A minor Op14.

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Piacere is Italian and means ‘to play with pleasure’, but this isn’t an Italian group. It’s a debut-making ensemble of British-based professionals. They’ve just taken this music to a warm church in Watford and a cold one in Haslemere. Now they were arriving into the native town and home of Piacere Piano Quintet’s founder and lead violinist, Inna Erskine. A big welcome greeted them on stage and a semi-tumultuous one floated them off it afterwards. Love at first sight.

The Piacere’s opening chord will have startled all but those in the near sell-out audience seasoned to the enormous potential sound of what is an orchestra in miniature. I was in the back row, against the back wall with probably no more than six wide rows stretching around the stage in front of me, seating 70-80 excited people. That first Coleridge Taylor downbeat hit me as a wall of sound, its cello bass note reaching right inside my stomach.

Piano quintet public appearances are scarce because of its five mouths to feed and the need for a durable grand piano. Do its members must prioritise more staple musical work. Name even a single world-known classical piano quintet ensemble! The Regis School’s intimate concert room stage and its Yamaha piano has hosted international names in the making, and later established ones. But its small stage had now needed emergency extension, and honest staff DIY skills had been pressed into service.

Judging by these two pieces from off the well-trodden track, Piacere are an ensemble setting out without a safety net to play with pleasure and widen general British audiences’ inevitably limited piano quintet perception beyond Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Dvorak.

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Much depends on your pianist’s prowess. Piacere billed their playing members starting with the pianist instead of ending with her. Confidence is theirs in Susie Renshaw, as it now ours after this delivery, especially of the pianistically almost unceasingly testing Saint-Saëns. And yet neither Coleridge Taylor nor Saint-Saëns were on a list I saw of the most popular 24 piano quintets.

To glimpse the broader genre richness of the quintet with orchestral stringed instruments, more performances would be helpful of, say, the ones by Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Medtner, Faure, Taneyev, Shostakovich, Bartok and Granados. What may one dare hope next from Piacere? We hope to discover.

These two arrestingly confident works are by the Briton (SCT) at age 18 and the Frenchman (CS-S) at 20, some 38 years later. In this music, both were making adamant, even vehement opening genre career statements about their own expressive power and serious creative potential. We know of Saint-Saëns’ vast and habitually virtuosic output across most musical avenues.

But Coleridge Taylor chamber music has been obscure, mainly because until this century dawned in this country, throughout the previous one his skin had been the wrong colour and his parentage frowned upon. Music establishment disqualification. Yes, there was popular Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast but that was about the redskinned underdogs.

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So, these two quintets, designed to turn heads? Both ticked most of the boxes as Piacere unfolded them, with ensemble solidity of concentration, projection and conviction. Both pieces had fugue--flavoured finales and were in minor keys. As was their season-acknowledging encore, an arrangement of the poignant French jazz standard Autumn Leaves, bearing one tremolando chill of northerly wind (Piacere must have known this week’s forecast!) but then a wistfully wan closing chord of a sixth.

In the Coleridge Taylor, Piacere were full-blooded, emphatic, exuberant, strong and driving. The music slalomed its own voice around the understandably nagging influence of its mainstream European contemporaries (listed above in the fourth paragraph). It had a questioningly accented scherzo and a dance-like fugal element giving meat to its finale. Its slow second movement brought extended notice of cellist Sarah Cavalho-Dubost’s big and smooth sound, which made one hanker to hear solo cello in this performing space.

I was struck by how, probably, Saint-Saëns had been writing this Quintet for his own performance, which in me translated into automatic admiration for Renshaw. I wondered what filled her tank during the preceding interval to see her through another elaborate challenge from this composer. He’s always seeming to draw attention to his bright and ever resourceful piano, in a work more conspicuously vivid and descriptive in its instrumentation and with, as my first impression, clearer formal layout signposting than the Coleridge Taylor.

The Saint-Saëns large keyboard chords maybe gave away his young masterly skill on the organ and it was easy to imagine, too, how he’d later rattled off five piano concertos. A chorale emerged importantly in the second and fourth movements. The first movement material gave the string sectionalised identity and the second gave them freedom to sustain a mood coloured by their being muted, and with the piano allowing them the acoustic space. The Piacere bows did rewarding duty here.

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The ceaselessly fast third movement was restored Piano Me-Time until handing over final word to the strings, who had been flying united above Renshaw’s flowing fingers and agile hands. ‘Fast but tranquil’ was the duality Saint-Saëns dictated for the finale, which it indeed fulfils on both counts and the composer seems to become his most emotional.

The strings are introduced one after another before the piano even clears its throat to speak, and the two forces at last seem levelled up. Emily Hester’s viola theme came nutty and throaty after the piano voices a fanfare, then the fugue ensues, breaking into speed. A further big statement, tranquillity returns, then quickens, and in conclusion the strings gather together to showcase the cascading piano.

Piacere set themselves no doddle. They deserved their ovation, and likewise Bognor Regis its kudos for this new ensemble birth that is a long way theirs. In times to come come may Piacere Piano Quintet repeat this kind of vibrant returning to roost.

Richard Amey

Susie Renshaw’s page turner was her piano duet partner, John Gibbons, director and conductor of Worthing Symphony Orchestra.

Upcoming concerts

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Sunday, November 24 at Worthing Assembly Hall, 3pm: ‘Orchestral Transformations’ – Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra, leader Adam Barker, conductor Dominic Grier. Stravinsky, Firebird Suite (1919 version); Liszt, Piano Concerto No 1 (soloist, Katya Grabova); Bartok, Concerto For Orchestra. Tickets from wtm.uk or on the door.

Saturday, November 30 at St Michael & All Angels Church, South Lancing (7.30) – ‘Wassail!’ The Boundstone Chorus with added school choirs of Sompting Village Primary and St Andew’s CE High Worthing, plus Call Me Al Jazz Quintet, in Alexander L’Estrange’s arrangements of traditional sacred and secular carols.

Sunday, December 15 at Worthing Assembly Hall (3pm): – Fairytale Christmas with Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Dominic Grier, Worthing Choral Society and Sompting Village Primary School Choir, directors Aedan Kerney and Sam Barton : favourites, classics, sing-alongs, including orchestral selections from Sleeping Beauty, Mother Goose, Hansel & Gretel, and Cinderella.

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