ST DUNSTAN’s and St Thomas of Canterbury, the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches of Mayfield, in Sussex, unite annually to present the town’s spring festival. This well-planned series of events (whose other venues include the Church Mouse Restaurant) brings together sacred and secular music, and daringly pairs unusual with more familiar repertoire.
The opening concert, by London Concertante, included music for ensemble spanning Mozart and Mendelssohn, Holst (his St Paul’s Suite) and Bartók. It also yielded a foretaste of this year’s featured composer, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, with an instrumental arrangement of his haunting piano solo “Farewell to Stromness”.
Sunday’s festival mass featured the dark-hued Missa Brevis by Zoltan Kodály — first performed by a mixed choir at the height of the Russian siege of Budapest in 1945. Then came “Plotting Murder in the Cathedral”, a lecture by Dr Andrew Chandler on “Bishop George Bell, the Church and the Life of the Arts in Britain, 1929-1958”. Dr Bell was a former Dean of Canterbury and a Bishop of Chichester of famed longevity. From these cathedral cities he gathered “a motley assortment of young and established talents, to launch a succession of bold, often controversial, ventures”.
Lecture proceeds went to George Bell House, the former Chichester Archdeaconry, which has been converted into a residential study and research centre. An exhibition of textiles, “The Colours of Pentecost”, was opened the same evening.
In one recital, members of The Oboe Band, a period-instrument ensemble who teach at the Royal College of Music, promoting oboe and bassoon music of the Baroque era, performed Lully, Krieger, Bach, and Purcell. In another, the baritone Sir Thomas Allen entertainingly joined forces with the soprano Elizabeth Watts, winner of the 2007 Cardiff Singer of the World Song Prize, and the accompanist Roger Vignoles. The harpist David Watkins played music by Croft and Mathias, and his own piece commemorating victims of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004.
It was for Mayfield’s festival and parish church that Sir Peter Maxwell Davies’s predecessor as Master of the Queen’s Music, Malcolm Williamson, wrote his opera Dunstan and the Devil. On this occasion, Sir Peter was present in person for performances of two of his most affecting works in the magnificent, high-arching, flaky Grade-II listed chapel of St Leonards-Mayfield School.
Dark Angels is Maxwell Davies’s three-part setting, for voice and guitar, of words by the poet George Mackay Brown. “The Drowning Brothers” commemorates with feeling and pathos the loss of two small boys who were drowned in the 1950s in a stream near the village of Rackwick. “The brother said (his throat a sculpted psalm) ‘The burn is our angel. He praises. He fills our pails. He flames in the face of the drinking beasts. . .’”
These were the last Orkney children to live in the valley until 1981, when Lucy Rendall, whose birth was celebrated by Maxwell Davies’s anthem “Lullabye for Lucy”, miraculously brought new life to this isolated green cove on the Pentland Firth.
“Dead Fires” is an epitaph for the village itself: each of the houses is evoked by name, short haiku-like stanzas recalling the life of the farming and fishing community stubbed out when unemployment drove villagers to the Orkney or Scottish mainland to find work. “The poor and the good fires are all quenched. Now, cold angel, keep the valley From the bedlam and cinders of A Black Pentecost.”
The work’s title, Dark Angels, refers to the surrounding hills, which in the poet’s imagination brood like “dark angels” over the boys’ (and the village’s) lingering death.
Maxwell Davies’s evocative settings, whose central section is furnished by a guitar interlude, are by turns passionate and serene, and were beautifully and touchingly sung by the young Guildhall-trained soprano Florence Andrews, with the Greek-born guitarist Antonis Hatzinikolaou, a postgraduate student at the Royal Academy of Music.
Even more striking was Maxwell Davies’s light-hearted, yet deadly serious, cabaret work The Yellowcake Revue, originally performed at the St Magnus Festival with the composer at the piano and Eleanor Bron as reciter. It is one of Maxwell Davies’s impassioned “green” works: like his symphony Black Pentecost, it mockingly decries the plans to open gaping open-cast uranium ore mines close to the second town of the Orkneys, Stromness.
“Farewell to Stromness”, Davies’s best-known piece, is one of the Revue’s piano interludes, and is all the more touching when heard, as here, in its grim context. It meant just that: the Orkney community would have been submerged in a vast industrial wasteland. The cogency of the argument (provisionally won by the anti-mining campaigners) is brought home by the wry mock-irony and simplicity of Maxwell Davies’s own words and music, modal or tonal in conception. The work can be performed by an upper or lower voice, and was here given to great effect by the singer-actor Adam Roberts, and the pianist Bob Broad, both scholars of the Royal Academy of Music.
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