Brahms String Sextets Nos 1 & 2 - Onyx
"The Nash offer superb new versions, crisp and clear, beautifully coordinated, with plenty of light and shade."
Gramophone, September 07

Brahms String Sextets Nos 1 & 2 - Onyx
"This is quite possibly the finest coupling of these works we've had in nearly 30 years, and the recording is as richly resonant and opulent as the performances themselves."
International Record Review, July/August 07

Mozart Piano Quartets K.478, K.493 - ASV Gold
"The Nash are right up there with the leaders in this dazzling Mozart coupling... There have been many fine versions of this favourite coupling but this new offering stands among the finest."
Gramophone, July 07

Brahms String Sextets - Onyx Classics
"What kind of man loves a married woman, pulls away when she is free, turns to another, then withdraws his proposal after she has accepted it? Brahms's String Sextets, written after his fractures with Clara Schumann and Agathe von Siebold, are among his most revealing works, the first hinting at his crippling insecurity, the second spelling out Agathe's name in its first movement. The Nash Ensemble's passionate reading may be too purple. Occasionally there is a cluttering of texture. Yet the intense, heel of the bow emotionality of this recording is also its most compelling aspect. A red wine, red meat disc from the must-have boutique label."
The Independent, 27 May 07

A Flute Sparkles in Mozart's Spirited, Rent-Paying Quartet
"Chamber music ensembles can sometimes seem like poorly arranged marriages, with a dynamic that doesn't quite work. But the members of the Nash Ensemble from London, who performed at the 92nd Street Y on Wednesday, were collegial and dynamic, attuned to one another (and in tune) throughout a wide variety of repertory...
The Nash Ensemble champions the British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, whose visceral music often hints at jazz influences. On Wednesday it played his dreamy, subtle "Three Farewells"...
The harp, which has a small role in the Turnage work, takes center stage in the sensually colored Introduction and Allegro for Flute, Clarinet, Harp and String Quartet by Ravel, a fan of the instrument. The Nash gave a stellar performance, with Lucy Wakeford, the harpist, playing the rippling arpeggios and evocative solo with finesse.
Debussy, unlike Mozart, never professed a dislike for the flute. The lights onstage dimmed for his fleeting "Syrinx" for Solo Flute, in which Ms. Davies evoked a pastorally meditative atmosphere.
Then it was on to a very different sound world with Mendelssohn's youthful String Quartet No. 2 in A minor, Op. 13, here given a fine reading that was bristling and passionate, lyrical and graceful. There was a lot of smiling onstage, and the Nash's enthusiasm was contagious. "
New York Times, 26 March 07       click here to view entire review

Nash Ensemble Premieres the Alluring 'Terrible Beauty,' Inspired by the Bard
"London's celebrated Nash Ensemble is a collective of players who form and regroup for varied chamber music programs. Particularly noted for its commitment to enlarging the repertoire for mixed ensembles, the Nash has championed 255 new works over its long history, nearly half of them commissions. On Tuesday evening at the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater, the Nash gave us one of the finest chamber music concerts of the season, both in programming and execution... The evening was a triumph"
Robert Battey, Washington Post, 22 March 07       click here to view entire review

Strauss: Metamorphosen; Piano Quartet in C minor; Prelude to Capriccio
Nash Ensemble - Hyperion CDA67574
"The playing has those many attributes you would expect from the Nash Ensemble, among them immaculate intonation and fluid tempos that allow the music to flow in long, unbroken phrases... When composing the Metamorphosen for 23 solo strings, Strauss had used a short score for string septet, almost certainly never intending it to be performed in that format. Itwas redicsovered in 1990 and subsequently published... Here it emerges as a very sad work, the Nash strings producing a gorgeous and velvety smooth sound."
David Denton, The Strad, April 07

Strauss: Metamorphosen; Piano Quartet in C minor; Prelude to Capriccio
Nash Ensemble - Hyperion CDA67574
"Reducing the string size of Strauss's Metamorphosen from 23 to the seven of the composer's short score, as Rudolf Leopold did in the 1990s, might seem to be going light on the tragic force of this great wartime elegy. Not so in the hands of the Nash Ensemble. If anything Strauss's most private moments of grief have even more eloquence, especially as they attempt to shy away from the monumental waves of emotion that threaten to engulf the memorial's closing stages... Truthful recording does full justice to the warmth, poise and integration of these marvelous performances."
Performance: *****
Sound: *****
David Nice, BBC Music Magazine, March 07

Realms of Gold at Wigmore Hall on Saturday 17 February 2007
"If it has demonstrated nothing else, the Nash's Realms of Gold series, highlighting Elgar and the British composers who succeeded him, has shown the range of a repertoire still stigmatised as parochial... the performers' precise interplay continued throughout an imaginative programme that was executed with distinction."
George Hall, The Guardian, 20 Feb 07

Strauss: Metamorphosen; Piano Quartet in C minor; Prelude to Capriccio
Nash Ensemble - Hyperion CDA67574
[Metamorphosen for solo strings] "...I am lost in admiration at The Nash Ensemble's achievement here in capturing the music's noble intensity with an emotional flexibility and glowing textural fluidity denied even Karajan's sensational Berlin players at their most refulgent.
Captured in immaculately balanced, velvety sound by producer Andrew Keener and engineer David Hinitt, this is a performance that gets right to the heart of this glorious score, tantalisingly retaining its chamber-scale purity even when Strauss is at his most super-heated. There are magic moments galore along the way, but to hear Marianne Thorsen (ravishing portamentos) and her fabulous team soar aloft with the pulsating phrases that briefly resolve at 16'48" is an unforgettable experience. The Prelude to Capriccio, Strauss's sublime operatic swan-song, also makes an indelible impression in this sensitive performance."
International Record Review, Feb 07

Strauss: Metamorphosen; Piano Quartet in C minor; Prelude to Capriccio
Nash Ensemble - Hyperion CDA67574
"This captivating disc from the Nash Ensemble features music from both ends of Richard Strauss's long and productive life. The Piano Quartet in C minor is a product of the 21-year-old composer's infatuation with the music of Brahms. In its own way it is a remarkable piece - as one early critic quoted in the booklet noted, it shows Strauss "a better Brahmsian than Brahms" - with a hint of the sweeping, ardent melodies of the high-Romantic Strauss to come. The Nash players certainly give it their all and make one wonder why it's not better known.
More familiar is Strauss's great late lament Metamorphosen, but it is played here in a realisation of his original draft for seven strings rather than the 23 he eventually settled upon. With a performance as searing as this, it makes just as much of a mark as the better-established "orchestral" version - the textures sound just as full, yet the intertwining lines emerge with greater focus and the whole is underlined by the tonal solidity of Duncan McTier's double bass. An equally seductive account of the string sextet Prelude to Capriccio completes the programme."
The Daily Telegraph, 27 Jan 07

Nash Ensemble Realms of Gold Series/John Mark Ainsley 20 Jan 2007
"A beautifully balanced programme and, yet again, a packed Wigmore Hall."
Bayan Northcott, The Independent, 24 Jan 07       click here to view entire review

Realms of Gold at Wigmore Hall on Saturday 20 January 2007
TRAVERSING ENGLAND'S MUSICAL LANDSCAPE
"The Nash Ensemble, under the artistic directorship of the indefatigable Amelia Freedman, has always led where others follow in terms of inspired and resourceful programme planning.
This season's Wigmore Hall concerts, for example, are exploring the early 20th-century British repertoire with a characteristic mix of the well-known and unfamiliar. The peg, as if any were really needed, is the 150th anniversary of Elgar's birth...
Peter Warlock's death-imbued Yeats setting The Curlew for flute, cor anglais and string quartet. Tenor John Mark Ainsley brought the acute detail of word-awareness and silvered tonal delivery for which he is renowned to Warlock's music.
He also shone in that other great chamber song cycle from the early 20th century, Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge, charting the bitter irony of A E Housman's "Is My Team Ploughing?" with searing intensity.
This wonderful piece also allowed the Nash's string players to shine, especially in the atmospheric expanses of "Bredon Hill", with its troubling transformation, in the string harmonics, of the hazy bells of summertime into the sombre tolling of winter."
Matthew Rye, The Daily Telegraph, 23 Jan 07       click here to view entire review

MENDELSSOHN: PIANO TRIOS, VARIATIONS CONCERTANTES
"The Nash give thoroughly sympathetic performances, keeping the textures lucid and shaping Mendelssohn's sumptuous tunes with subtlety and grace."
The Daily Telegraph, 6 Jan 07

Nash Ensemble at Wigmore Hall, 4 December 2006
BRITTEN AND HIS MANY LOVES
"The brilliance of Britten's writing for strings was further emphasised in the Nash Ensemble's performance of Les Illuminations, Phaedra and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings under Edward Gardner. Heard in the Wigmore's perfect acoustics and played by small ensemble of indisputable virtuosi these were almost overwhelming. Biting violins, intoxicating violas, warm cellos and fervent double-basses magnified the opulence of Rimbaud's words and Britten's dazzling orchestration."
Anna Picard, The Independent, 10 Dec 06

Nash Ensemble at Wigmore Hall, 4 December 2006
CONCERT: NASH ENSEMBLE * * * * *
"Call me mad or fanciful, but sitting in the packed Wigmore Hall, 30 years after Benjamin Britten's death, I felt a real sense of the composer's spirit infusing the performers who delivered this superlative evening of his vocal music... the string players of the Nash Ensemble, under Edward Gardner's direction, matched her [Lisa Milne] for fervour, digging their bows deep into the raw opening fanfares and maintaining this exhilarating energy to the last... Mark Padmore's account of the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings - magnificently enhanced by Richard Watkins's virtuosic horn-playing - brought me close to tears (for the right reasons, I hasten to add)."
Richard Morrison, The Times, 6 Dec 06

NASH ENSEMBLE: REALMS OF GOLD
"The Nash Ensemble seems incapable of giving anything less than a first-rate performance. The regular line-up of musicians is now stronger than it ever has been and, together with the imaginative and carefully thought out programmes, makes Nash concerts unmissable."
Michael Allen, classicalsource.com 10 Oct 06

ST MAGNUS FESTIVAL * * * * *
"Ravel's lovely Introduction and Allegro and Maxwell Davies's less well-known but equally elegant Dove, Star-Folded were followed by a peerless F Minor Piano Quintet by Johannes Brahms, its military scherzo and wonderfully constructed finale given a performance absolutely out of the top drawer."
Keith Bruce, Glasgow Herald, 22 July 06

THE NASH ENSEMBLE SETS THE BENCHMARK FOR BRAHMS
"...the Nash Ensemble's glorious Wigmore Hall performance from last October of the Brahms... it's a thoughtful, supple reading marked by a wonderful sense of teamwork, with Richard Hosford's fluid clarinet subtly embedded in the overall sound, and some magical string sonorities, especially in the muted slow movement... With some typically imaginative Nash programming, the Brahms is complemented by Schumann's delightful Fairy Tales for clarinet, viola and piano, and an enjoyable rediscovery by Mendelssohn's mentor Ignaz Moscheles, based on a Bohemian folk song. Fine performances, especially from Ian Brown...""
BBC Music Magazine, May 06

"After 40 years and 250 premieres, the Nash Ensemble is till the best champion that any composer could hope to have. Its concerts are always meticulously polished, but what most impressed about this heroically well-stuffed programme - two premieres and four other chamber pieces, none more than four years old - was the illusion conjured by these players that they have lived with this music for years, even if the ink was barely dry on the page. Perhaps it is precisely because this ensemble is not entirely dedicated to doing contemporary work that it can radiate so persuasive a feeling of new pieces being assimilated into a chamber-music heritage stretching back two centuries or more."
Richard Morrison, The Times, 24 March 06

NASH ENSEMBLE * * * * *
"In an exceptional concert consisting entirely of its own commissions, the Nash Ensemble showed why they are among today's most outstanding and enterprising groups."
Paul Conway, The Independent, 27 March 06

"Less well informed media folk may think it smart to assert that 'classical music is dead', but this could hardly be more wrong as far as the Nash Ensemble and its following are concerned. Three days after giving an exhilarating concert of contemporary premieres in the Purcell Room, here the Ensemble was back in the Wigmore, rounding off its 40th anniversary season with a programme of core classics to a packed house... At the end, the audience responded so enthusiastically that Watkins finally had to tell everyone to go home."
Bayan Northcott, The Independent, 25 March 05

CONCERT WITH FELICITY LOTT & BERNARD HAITINK
"So, when Lott, in gloriously golden voice, began her sustained monologue, it was the individual voices of the Nash Ensemble's soloists who joined her musings: the sweet questioning violin of Marianne Thorsen, the flute of Philippa Davies, the horn of Richard Watkins. This arrangement for voice and ensemble was by David Matthews, and it was a masterly fusion of Straussian nostalgia... This is Till Eulenspiegel the animation: an irresistable miniature in which the soloists of the Nash made the Schmalz sweeter and the satire sharper still."
Hilary Finch, The Times, 20 Dec 05

AN ENRICHING WAY WITH THE CLASSICS
"It was a concert that left one uplifted and enriched."
Ivan Hewett, The Daily Telegraph, 27 Sept 05

NASH SAINT SAENS CD FOR HYPERION
"Never mind the academic pooh-poohing - this collection is sheer delight..."
Peter Quantrill, Gramophone, July 05

"...the Nash Ensemble appears unchanged: impeccably musical, fresh, humane. Contemporary music couldn';t have better ambassadors."
Geoff Brown, The Times, March 05

BEETHOVEN CLARINET TRIO / MENDELSSOHN OCTET - WIGMORE HALL LIVE
"What better way to launch Wigmore Hall Live, the venue's new label, than with the Mendelssohn Octet, led by the Nash Ensemble's superb first violin, Marianne Thorsen? ...The playing is vital and, especially in the divine Andante, subtle and expressive. The ensemble's versatility is illustrated by a neat account of Beethoven's early Clarinet Trio - music that, if not remotely as precocious as the 16-year-old Mendelssohn's, has humour, charm and moments of typical audacity."
Sunday Times, Nov 04

AN EARLY BIRTHDAY PRESENT TO BE TREASURED
"Last week the Nash Ensemble dedicated a whole concert to (mostly) recent music by the American doyen Elliott Carter, calling it a 95th-birthday tribute. It was rather jumping the gun, since Carter doesn't turn 95 until next December: but the programme was so delicately planned and so superbly performed that calender-niggles were irrelevant. Carter would have loved it..."
David Murray, Financial Times, March 03

HEAD RULES THE HEART IN SCHUMANN CELEBRATION
"Amelia Freedman was in the audience for this concert. This in itself was not unusual, since, as head of music on the South Bank for more than a decade, she has been a familiar figure fondly respected and admired at countless events. But the Philharmonia Orchestra, in dedicating this programme to her as she relinquishes the post offered a timely salute for all that she has done at the Festival Hall and its satellite venues to consolidate the musical programming, keeping it constantly alive and injecting it with fresh ideas in the many award-winning series that have not merely taken place under her aegis but were actually the fruits of her own imagination. Her wise and genial counsel on the South Bank will be greatly missed, for, aside from her obvious skills, she managed to achieve the almost impossible feat of maintaining friendships across a whole spectrum of the musical profession with composers, performers, impresariois - and even with us journalists."
Geoffrey Norris, The Daily Telegraph, 5 July 06