Join Dolgellau's NEW 100 Club click here for more information

Though wide variety is aimed for in each season’s programming, the core of the Club’s remit is to put on chamber music of the highest quality of a kind that local music-lovers would otherwise have to travel many miles to hear. That aim was amply and resonantly fulfilled in the recital given at Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor on Friday 12th March by the Nicholas Jones Trio - Nicholas Jones (cello), David Campbell (clarinet) and Tom Poster (piano).

Both Nicholas Jones and David Campbell are well known in Wales, not least as past and present Directors respectively of the Aberystwyth Musicfest. Nick was founder of Dolgellau Music Club in 1985, so it was very good to be able to welcome him back to play in the Club’s twenty-fifth season. Tom Poster already has a most impressive CV, and was winner of the keyboard section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition in 2000. As a Trio these distinguished musicians play together with all the mutual responsiveness that chamber music at this (or any) level requires, and their performance in Dolgellau could equally as well have graced a venue such as the Wigmore Hall.

The programme opened with two superb pieces for clarinet and piano duo, Debussy’s ‘Première Rapsodie’ and the Duo Op 15 by Norbert Burgmüller (1810 – 1836). Both pieces are full of hummable tunes and lively contrasts, and in the impeccable and spirited performances given here, proved the perfect way to engage and enthuse an audience.

Thus prepared, listeners were well able to meet the challenge of a more extended and darker piece, the remarkable Sonata for cello & piano in D minor by Frank Bridge. Composed between 1913 and 1917, this work conveys with intensity the spiritual travails of its pacifist composer, who is said to have spent many a night at this time pacing the streets of Kensington. Like a Wilfred Owen poem it combines deep anguish with great beauty, and is unashamedly romantic in scope and ardour. Nicholas Jones’s and Tom Poster’s interpretation was both raw and eloquent, abrasive as needed yet also sweet-toned and yearning. It was striking that, from an audience of well over 100, there came not a single cough in the break between the two longish movements.

After the interval came Brahms’s sublime Trio in A minor Op 114, which for many will have been the high point of the evening. Written in the autumn of his career after Brahms had been inspired by the playing of clarinettist Richard Mühlfeld, this work displays the colours and characteristics of clarinet, cello and piano in perfect equilibrium, and is a delight from first note to last. Although many were clearly disappointed not to be granted an encore to round off the programme, it was right that such a perfect piece was given the last word.

The next concert (at 7.30pm in Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor) will be one of ‘Celtic Jazz Fusion’, to be given on Friday 26 March by Harriet Earis (Celtic harp), Sam Christie (drums / percussion) and Richard Hughes (keyboard).

Return to review index »