Various venues, Sheffield
Whatever the explanation for the unusually fine weather, it has been a Prague Spring in Sheffield, where, for the opening weekend of the Music in the Round festival, the City Hall ballroom was transformed into a Bohemian grand cafe, complete with waltzing and pastry-making workshops.
The 11 instrumentalists of the resident band, Ensemble 360, make up one of the most adaptable chamber groups in the country. There was the chance to hear an unusual example of super-charged Haydn, an Op 71 string quartet in an expanded version by Paul Wranitzky that added winds, brass and double bass. An unexpected highlight was Martinů's Nonet, whose pulsing phase effects suggested the Czech master had foreseen minimalism.
Yet the dominant feature was the remarkable profusion of work the septuagenarian Janáček produced in response to his infatuation with Kamila Stösslová, a married woman almost 40 years his junior. The 1924 Concertino showed the composer in Moravian woodland mode, with playfully onomatopoeic references to forest creatures, including a squeaky E-flat clarinet as a skittish squirrel.
The Second String Quartet, subtitled Intimate Letters, was an extraordinarily candid and at times despairing expression of a one-sided relationship. Ensemble 360 interleaved the four movements with readings from Janáček's letters (expertly provided by Crucible director Daniel Evans) that combined passages of sensuality with a revealing commentary on the composer's working methods: "I aim [to] follow the melody of speech, not a sentimental line like the Germans." It was a fine concept that seamlessly modulated between the spoken word and its musical subtext.