11:11am Tuesday 7th September 2010
By John Rushby-Smith
Adventurous, challenging, enthralling, the wonderful Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts has just completed its 28th season. Largely dedicated, as always, to the performance of new and recent music, this year’s programme was richer than ever. Works ranged from experimental concoctions by emerging talents to the refined fare of well-established contemporary masters, such as composer-in-residence Hugh Wood, whose music has a great humanity and intellectual depth missing from the work of some of his much younger colleagues. Also celebrated was Samuel Barber’s centenary, and the music of these two giants illumined a festival firmament glittering with stars.
Wood’s Divertimento for Strings began proceedings, the Festival’s Artistic Director George Vass wielding his baton to draw fine playing from his expert orchestra. They were then joined by composer and pianist John McCabe for a witty rendering of Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments, and by Sara-Jane Bradley who played Paul Patterson’s Viola Concerto with sensitivity. As if to remind us that all music was contemporary once, the concert finished with the first of the Festival’s many commissions, David Matthews’s effective orchestral arrangement of Elgar’s E minor String Quartet.
Cecilia McDowall’s The Colour of Blossoms is a ravishing piece for violin, cello and piano. Along with Hugh Wood’s impressive Piano Trio Op.24 it was brilliantly played in the second concert by resident artists Thomas Gould, Marie Macleod and Tom Poster. In between came 21-year-old Matthew Sheeran’s ebullient clarinet trio Dreamtime, which won the Festival’s Competition for Composers and the Alan Horne Composition Prize. The clarinettist in this and the Brahms Clarinet Trio in A that ended the concert was Catriona Scott. These performers, along with the skilful winds of the Galliard Ensemble* and the Tippett Quartet, cropped up in various events throughout the Festival, the last tackling the tour-de-force of musical architecture that is Michael Tippett’s String Quartet No.3 with exuberant prowess.
Vocal contributions were provided eloquently in two concerts by the Joyful Company of Singers, while the charmingly resilient mezzo-soprano Clare McCaldin not only gave her own song recital with pianist Simon Lepper but also sang new works in four other concerts, among them the Festival Finale performance of Hugh Wood’s Beginnings – an evocative reworking of three of his early songs.
Controversy reigned after the closing concert. To some beautiful orchestral playing, Thomas Gould was giving a sparkling account of Mozart’s D major Violin Concerto, when at the cadenza he picked up an electric fiddle, switched on a sequencer and launched into a blue grass montage of Mozart’s figures that went on far too long for the joke not to wear thin. It was iconoclastic, but, as George Vass remarked afterwards, if you can’t do that sort of thing in Presteigne, where can you do it?
Few festivals can match Presteigne for friendliness and good humour. Add the medieval grandeur of St Andrew’s Church and the intimacy of local village churches, throw in some intriguing talks, walks, exhibitions and a stack of welsh cakes and the whole Presteigne experience is a joy. George is already gathering ingredients for next year. Be there!
*Under Presteigne Festival auspices, the Galliard Ensemble and various specially-commissioned composers will conduct workshops with local primary school children throughout September. The project, called Creating Landscapes, will culminate in a free concert in Presteigne on September 24th. Phone 01544 267800 or email alisongiles@presteignefestival.com for more details.
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