IN a programme that has Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time as its climax, a work for cello and piano sounds like a work for half an ensemble.
That, however, was just what gave Edward McGuire's little elegy entitled Thalamion its peculiar intensity of utterance. It possessed a rueful, very Scottish beauty, through which a variety of allusions - ranging from a sort of Elgarian droop on the cello to Nyman-like ripples on the piano - could be discerned. Though commissioned four years ago by a doctor in memory of his wife, this quietly emotional music was only now receiving its first performance. Pauline Dowse and Lynda Cochrane, two members of the Paragon Ensemble, played it with just the sympathy it called for.
Earlier, with Edwin Paling and John Cushing, they had revived Complementi, which Thomas Wilson composed almost quarter of a century ago for the Messiaen-inspired line-up of violin, cello, clarinet, and piano. Though the title could be taken to refer to the instrumental connections between the two works, the important complementary features principally lay inside Wilson's own music and in what the composer has called the ''interpenetration'' of his ideas. The clarinet's opening calls to attention were brilliantly projected by John Cushing and the same instrument's disappearance at the end, as if in a puff of smoke, was no less effectively handled.
The vast landscape of Messiaen's quartet was inevitably harder to sustain but the great central cello solo was unfurled with deep and unfaltering intensity by Pauline Dowse. Though Edwin Paling's foot-stamping in the faster music was seriously intrusive, he rose to the challenge of the haunting but treacherous finale.
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