THE STRAD
(Wigmore Hall, May 2005)
 
The London Bridge Ensemble is named equally for the composer Frank Bridge and the well-known way of crossing the Thames. It's a mixed group, which appeared at the Wigmore Hall on 23 May with a string quartet plus bass, a piano and a baritone. They demonstrated throughout the evening an extraordinary ability to weave and sustain extended melodic lines. This showed to great advantage in Fauré's D minor Piano Trio, particularly the slow movement, in which the composer's relentlessly intensifying musical paragraphs were played with steadily increasing power. Bridge featured twice. Violist Tom Dunn brought modulated and sensitive playing to the Three Songs with Viola, subtly interweaving with Ivan Ludlow's singing of Bridge's elegiac settings. Later his Phantasy Trio found the players again negotiating supple, elongated lines before emerging enthusiastically into the rich-toned passion of the final pages.

Between the two Bridges came a ... David Matthews piece, the premiere of Voyages for voice and piano quartet. These fine settings of Baudelaire and Hugo have, appropriately, an intangible French quality, with deceptively simple, expressive vocal lines complemented by string and piano writing of constant invention. Here and in the final work, Fauré's La Bonne Chanson, the group produced sounds of unfailing beauty and warmth.

MUSICAL OPINION
(Wye Valley Chamber Music Festival, January 2007)
 
Schumann’s First Piano Trio in which Daniel Tong was joined by Benjamin Nabarro and Kate Gould... The balance of headlong flow with deeply expressive melodic writing was negotiated with a real instinct for Shumann’s characteristic heart-on-sleeve utterance yet also captures the intimations of pain that are also unquestionably present. (...) There was often a fierce intensity about the music making, but also the simple joy that chamber music engenders. This was indeed the music of friends.


SHEFFIELD TELEGRAPH
(Music in the Round, Sheffield Crucible, March 2007)
 
This concert promised to be something special and so it was, comprehensively! It started off with a sweepingly majestic account of Frank Bridge's Phantasy Trio with its latent rhapsodic feel given full value. The pianist proved equally adept in the different sound world of Schumann, contributing to a particularly fine performance of the composer's Op 24 Liederkreis. His belief and above all that of top-drawer baritone Ivan Ludlow in the work did wonders for its poor relation with Schumann's Op 39 Liederkreis.

Maybe the singer did treat the nine Heine songs with more than a degree of operatic emphasis but it tended to evaporate in the nine, living mini-dramas he created with firm and evenly produced tone. With the flowing viola tones of Rachel Roberts added, Bridge's Three songs with viola again showed how vastly underrated English song is when performed as engagingly as here.

Then it was gloves off for Brahms' Op 25 piano quartet as the musicians threw themselves at the music with skill, agility and rich, fulsome sound with electrifying results, especially in the last movement. A degree of humour was found in the central movements and, okay, the last one, a rumbustious Hungarian dance is a crowd-pleaser but here it had depth while zipping along with sheer virtuosity and note accuracy.

Music and Vision
(Wigmore Hall, June 2007)
 
A Divine Evening
The London Bridge Ensemble
plays Brahms, Beethoven and Schumann,
enjoyed by TAU WEY
 
The Wigmore Hall, Britain's chamber music venue ne plus ultra, hosted the London Bridge Ensemble [5 June 2007], which performed a mixture of chamber music and song. In a programme which consisted entirely of music by nineteenth-century German composers, the ensemble chose such core works as Brahms' Piano Quartet No 1 and Schumann's Liederkreis.
 
While the rest of the music scene is moving towards innovation and renewal, drawing increasingly on multi-cultural music and new media, this concert at the Wigmore Hall rested comfortably with Romantic chamber music and song, which many in the audience would have been familiar with. Indeed, the fact that audience members at this hall are often acquainted with the works as well as the performers are, is both daunting and exciting.
 
Although the programme was conventional, the ensemble did not need to be apologetic. Their performance shone from beginning to end, producing endlessly beautiful sounds that defied the acoustics by ringing on in the air beyond the end of the pieces. Schumann's Piano Trio No 1 in D minor was performed with great commitment and tireless energy. The first movement was passionate, yet when the section with the cello harmonics arrived, the ensemble immediately created a heavenly sound that was chilling in its power. The tricky scherzo movement that followed was executed with faultless ensemble, culminating in a gloriously uplifting finish, The slow movement began with an exceptionally moving violin solo, and continued to be sublime and intense in expression. The last movement is, from the compositional point of view, somewhat long-winded and structurally awkward. However, the ensemble gave a successful performance with their sheer energy and tonal resourcefulness.
 
Schumann had no such structural problems in his Liederkreis, Op 24. The musical expressions he wanted to convey also flowed out much more easily and concisely. The change from the combination of piano trio to accompanied voice was very welcome, the transformation of sound and texture being an immense relief from the intensity of the piano trio. Indeed, it felt as if the voice that yearned to sing in Schumann's trio was finally given a human voice in the songs. Ivan Ludlow's powerful and beautiful voice was able both to illuminate the proud and masculine sides of this song cycle as well as to delve into the subtler semantics of the poems. The Welsh Folk Songs by Beethoven were equally successful. Unusually accompanied by piano, violin and cello, Beethoven arranged these songs for amateurs. In the hands of these virtuosi, this simple music could not help but dance, fly and rejoice. For the audience it was thoroughly entertaining.
 
The final work, Brahms' Piano Quartet No 1 in G minor, had intense joy and life. The ensemble performed with a supreme sympathy for each other, which the audience by now had become accustomed to. There was a sense of unity and common purpose in their performance, which is the ideal of chamber music realised at its best.
 
It was a divine evening of music making.

Bridge CD review - International Record Review
International Record Review

The variety of instrumental and vocal forces for which Frank Bridge wrote means that any number of imaginatively compiled recitals is possible. This new release amply demonstrates the expressive range from which the composer was able to draw from the well-defined limits of his first full decade of creativity: at its centre, Three Songs With Viola (1907) are a delightful follow-up to a sub-genre pioneered by Brahms: The pensive melancholy of Matthew Arnold’s ‘Far, far from each other’ is followed by the passionate enquiry of Heine’s ‘Where is it that our soul doth go?’, then the serene resignation of Shelley’s ‘Music, when soft voices die’. Viola and piano deftly intertwine without ever impeding each other, and this compact song-cycle deserves more frequent revival. Moreover, its inward depth is thrown into ample relief by the miniatures on either side: Scherzo, rendered characterfully by Kate Gould, and Souvenir, winsomely dispatched by Benjamin Nabarro.

On either side of these is a group of four songs. While there can be little doubt as to their intrinsic quality, their unrelieved seriousness gives a rather one-sided impression of Bridge’s song-writing for all that Ivan Ludlow’s earnest delivery is finely attuned to the fervency of Come to me in my dreams (1907), the ethereal calm of Dawn and Evening (1903), the serenity of Night lies on the silent highways and the fatalism of A dead violet (both 1904). This uniformity at least helps underline the sheer variety of the two Phantasies that frame the disc, both of them entries in the annual Cobbett competitions that did so much to foster interest in chamber music by British composers of the period. If the Phantasie Piano Trio (1907) is both more diverse in content and more dramatic in emotional contrasts, the Phantasie Piano Quartet (1910) is tauter and more finely integrated, its motivic material transformed, indeed transcended, in a coda whose opening onto a new expressive plane anticipates the chamber masterpieces of Bridge’s full maturity.

The quality of playing and recording here, not to mention Giles Easterbrook’s informative booklet note, is such that this disc deserves an enthusiastic recommendation.


Power, imagination, and sheer passion
Allmusic.com

This disc dedicated to the exceedingly romantic fin de siècle music of English composer Frank Bridge has a superbly balanced program. It opens with his Phantasie Piano Quartet from 1910, closes with his Phantasie Piano Trio from 1907, and in between it alternates sets of songs with lighter instrumental works: the Scherzo for cello and piano from 1902 and the Souvenir for violin and piano from 1904. The performances are just as well balanced. The cleverly named London Bridge Ensemble pianist Daniel Tong, violinist Benjamin Nabarro, violist Tom Dunn, and cellist Kate Gould gives both Phantasies the power, imagination, and sheer passion they need to succeed, and their duets in the Scherzo and Souvenir are equally impressive. Bridge's songs are worth hearing by anyone who likes the composer, and the instrumental pieces are well worth hearing by anyone who likes the period. Dutton's digital sound is essentially translucent: with the speakers correctly positioned, the London Bridge Ensemble will seem to be in the same room as the listener.