It really was a dark and stormy night. The weather and the trek down to the church of St John the Evangelist might in fact have contributed to heightening the audience’s expectations of what was already a relatively ambitious programme. Performed by the Oxford-based string ensemble Corona, Benjamin Britten’s musical adaptation of French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s visionary collection of prose poems, Les Illuminations, effectively added to the gloomy atmosphere of the evening by its intensity and the nine contemplative texts’ underlying tensions, which it translates rather accurately into another form of art.
Conducting the formation which mixes period instruments and the more usual selection of strings, Janet Lincé equally directs soprano Erica Eloff for the central piece of the evening. Elgar’s Serenade in E minor, his Opus 47 Introduction and Allegro and John Ireland’s milder Concertino Pastorale come to complete the programme built around Britten’s work and the general theme of early 20th century “Englishness.”
One of the peculiarities of this ensemble is the wide range of sounds it covers. Larger than a chamber orchestra and far too experienced to be compared to a single instrument-category band still focusing on its coherence, Corona makes being constituted exclusively of diff erent types of strings an original advantage among Oxford’s many quality classical formations. The depth of the sound produced by two basses easily balances the absence both of wind and percussion instruments. They achieve a particularly rhythmic eff ect when playing pizzicato, almost bringing too much of the audience’s attention to their part. Although not the subtlest of associations, this combination of short, deep notes and longer strokes of the bow from the violas and violins avoids all monotony and successfully renders the mood and tempo contrasts in Britten’s intense suite of pieces.
Erica Eloff ’s strong presence and full voice resonate under the beautifully painted ceiling of St John’s with an air of dramatic authenticity well suited for the third part of the lluminations, ‘Royalty’. After the intellectual, persistent style of Britten’s composition, Ireland’s piece comes with its pleasingly lighter mood, toying with the artistic cliché of pastoral scenes full of warmth and gaiety.
Reflecting the evocative imagery of the poems which go from mentioning fantasised historical settings such as “old craters, surrounded by colossal statues and palms of copper” to the freer “streams of the barren land and the immense tracks of the ebbtide,” Corona delivers a colourful performance.
The formation demonstrates its own capacity to switch rapidly from a series of musical interjections to the longer, lighter phrases of John Ireland’s rarely played Concertino Pastorale as well as Elgar’s oscillations between mellow and troubled themes
