Invitation: Mozart, Mendelssohn & Schumann

After 10 years as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director of the Irish Chamber Orchestra, Jörg Widmann is leaving for pastures new. This ‘Invitation’ debut for the orchestra on Pentatone thus presents three works he describes as encapsulating some of their most special moments together. They’re also a very generous selection – the sense is of a desire to showcase the ICO strengths he has most relished over his tenure, and it is indeed impossible not to emerge from this album with sky-high admiration for the orchestra’s technical and expressive ensemble virtuosity.

Widmann begins side by side with his ICO colleagues on his clarinet, for Mozart’s C minor Serenade for winds (pairs of oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns). It’s great stuff: an opening gambit of dark, wide, textural bristle, before a swiftly fluid downwards melt into softer legato sighs, with mercurial colour shifts remaining a constant pleasure as the music proceeds to tick restlessly onwards. That tautly clipped precision and sophisticated colouring is put to especially fine use over the Minuet’s nuanced contrapuntal writing, and their darkly spry finale is superb – taken at an exhilaratingly smartly articulated lick, counterbalanced by lovely rubato expressivity for its lyrical interjections.

The ICO strings make correspondingly tactile, nimbly expressive hay of Mendelssohn’s Mozart-hearkening String Symphony in D minor with its own contrast-rich interplay of darkness and light. There’s all sorts of lovely personal colour in its chamber textures (revel in their Adagio). Their Menuet is a dazzler: flying, light-filled virtuosity with a deliciously chuckling Trio – what happens when you dish out those off-kilter rhythms with light-weighted, superglued ensemble speed and metrical elasticity.

Then having shown us what they’re made of apart, the musicians unite for the joyous Overture, Scherzo and Finale in E major by Mendelssohn’s colleague, Schumann: more lucid-textured, virtuosically swiftly superglued rhythmic gaming and rapidly changing expression, but now with grim anxiety firmly in the rear view mirror.

Clearly this is not the end of the collaborative road for the ICO and Widmann. There’s too much of a sense of collegial fun about it all. My one qualm is what a very old-fashioned-feeling programme it is. It isn’t that Pentatone albums don’t present all manner of core and longstanding repertoire, but it’s usually programmed in unique, thought-filled ways designed to draw the listener into some clearly articulated world or idea; whereas I do rather wonder whether ‘Invitation’ was a deliberately oblique title, thought up afterwards alongside the artwork, to edge the whole closer towards house style. Still, there are worse album messages than ‘We enjoy playing together, we programme musicologically, and we’re very good’. So if Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schumann is your ideal combination, there’s much to enjoy here.