Nick Martin’s ‘Maternal’ evokes Hepworth’s place in the UK’s cultural landscape — a concerto shimmering between prayer, tenderness and melancholy. Heard live, it resists earnestness and reveals a flawed, human character in a landscape both intimate and vast.
Nick Martin Violin Concerto (Maternal)
Tamsin Waley-Cohen Violin/Director
Caroline Pether Director
Manchester Camerata
Nick Martin’s new concerto Maternal, premiered by Tamsin Waley-Cohen and Manchester Camerata, is a love letter to sculptor Barbara Hepworth — a work that celebrates a titan of abstract art, stirs nostalgia, and transports Aldeburgh Festival regulars back to Snape Maltings, where Hepworth’s Family of Man has recently been reinstated.
Drawing on interviews with Hepworth’s granddaughter, Martin pitches the work with canny authority. The result is an intensely sensory slow-burn, glowing with joy, pride and melancholy. Maternal begins as a pensive meditation, later radiating warmth, inclusivity, hope, and strength. Its shifts between tenderness, joy, and melancholy might risk earnestness if heard only on the radio, yet live the narrative line holds together — suggesting a flawed, human character in a shifting, sometimes unfathomable landscape.
Martin blurs boundaries between movements: strummed instruments and humming beneath a cadenza presumably mark the transition into the final section. The apparent lack of contrast places a demand on players and audience alike — a trust in the through-line only revealed fully in performance.
Heard live, the work proves unexpectedly touching — music made for performance, ideally in the round, with those most attuned to texture and resonance placed at its heart.
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