CHRISTOPHER SMITH UEA School of Music, Norwich

CHRISTOPHER SMITH

UEA School of Music, Norwich

The young musicians of the Ulysses Ensemble opened their recital with Webern's arrangement of Schoenberg's first Chamber Symphony.

Scored for five instruments, the work was presented with fire and energy. Matthew Hunt's clarinet was both

rich and agile, while Alasdair Tait played his cello with tremendous

animation.

Julieanne Klein was the soprano soloist in Ravel's Three Madagascan Songs. In the first, a lyric about boundless voluptuous love on an exotic island, she sounded and looked rather glum. She was more on the mark with her characterisation in a passionate tirade about the wrongs of colonial exploitation.

After this she adopted a gentler manner, as she sang of a young girl's joys living close to nature.

Pierrot Lunaire next gave the singer her opportunity to show her versatility in the special vocal style that Schoenberg devised.

The poems themselves - no fewer than 21 of them, though they were mostly short - introduced a series of hair raising situations for the macabre Pierrot. An odd man out, he found good

advocates in the Ulysses Ensemble.