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Reviews

Paul Driver, The Sunday Times, 20 February 2011

Soon afterwards, a young conductor restored my faith in the profession, and more than that. Geoffrey Paterson, who is on Covent Garden's Jette Parker Young Artists Programme, led the Theseus Ensemble (which he founded last year) at the Linbury in one of the programme's free Monday-lunchtime recitals. With the mezzo-soprano Louise Collett, they offered George Benjamin's coruscating Yeats setting, Upon Silence, and Le Marteau sans maître, by their patron, Pierre Boulez. This masterpiece of complex serialism is shaped with a felicitous rigour comparable to that of Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, about which Boulez has written admiringly. It is a hundred times harder to perform, and it always seems a miracle that anyone brings it off. These brilliant young professionals radiated devotion.


Mark Berry, Boulezian, 14 February 2011
Link to full review at bottom of page

...any ensemble, let alone one that has been in existence for less than a year, which performs Le marteau sans maître deserves praise most fulsome, especially when presented as well as it was here...

...all players evidently gave their best throughout, and it showed. Invidious though it may be to single out any one member of the ensemble, I feel I must mention Matthew Kettle’s valiant and successful struggle with Boulez’s well-nigh impossible viola part...





Paul Driver, The Sunday Times, 14 November 2010

Another key work of 1968-69, Harrison Birtwistle's chunky, brassy and theatrical Verses for Ensembles - the earliest of his many London Sinfonietta commissions - had an outing from the recently formed Theseus Ensemble at the Royal College of Music, conducted by the impressive Geoffrey Paterson. He gave us engaging, if lengthy, pre-performance analyses of this and the other item, Brian Elias's Geranos, an instrumental sextet composed for the Fires of London in 1985, and a fascinating piece. Greek rhythm is its preoccupation, and one reference of the Greek title is to a dance invented by Theseus on eluding the Minotaur.
The programme was called Out of the Labyrinth, and Birtwistle's habitually labyrinthine notion of musical form was apropos. Both works were played with manifest stylish fluency. Elias's beautifully contrived and "heard" modernist idiom reflects a 20-year development - and even refinement - of the approaches of the 1960s, but it clearly originates in that fertile land.


Mark Berry, Boulezian, 6 November 2010
Link to full review at bottom of page

...such was the high standard of performance that one could hardly have failed to sit up and listen...

...rhythmic precision and definition are crucial in such respects; the Theseus Ensemble succeeded triumphantly in imparting them...

...Secret Theatre seemed to beckon, inescapably: a privilege afforded by this fine performance...