A REMARKABLE FESTIVAL made its first appearance in Dorchester Abbey, near the Thames a few miles south of Oxford, two years ago. Founded by a visionary artistic director, Em Marshall, it was devoted solely to English music, and included not just familiar names, but many that are not.
The festival pans across British (not necessarily English) worthies from Sir Alexander Mackenzie and Vaughan Williams’s Socialist-minded comrade Rutland Boughton to mid-20th-century composers such as Finzi’s friends Howard Ferguson, Edmund Rubbra, and William Lloyd Webber (this was his orchestral Nocturne; now let’s have his ravishing Aurora), who were almost systematically eclipsed by the Serialist mantras of the 1960s.
One could list hordes still to come, from Sir Julius Benedict (1804-85) to Arnold Cooke (1906-2005) and Finzi’s sole pupil Anthony Scott (b. 1911), or those earlier trusties William Crotch, James Nares, and Purcell’s teacher Pelham Humfrey.
Thomas Arne’s playful, masque-like treatment of The Judgment of Paris, recently staged by New College, was set alongside Thomas Linley’s charming ode In Yonder Grove, to reveal, thanks to the Cannon Scholars, directed by John Andrews, just what an 18th-century master Arne was: Purcell’s natural successor as much as Handel.
Bantock’s Celtic Symphony was a real coup. Other druidic paraphernalia (Boughton adored them) might have sat well here; for Dorchester was also a significant pre-Roman lowland settlement, as huge earth banks by a river testify.
Whereas the conductor David Lloyd Jones and the cellist Julian Lloyd Webber launched the 2006 festival with a riveting performance of Frank Bridge’s cello concerto Oration, this year it was Hilary Davan Wetton and his Milton Keynes Orchestra who set the standards with Bridge’s intriguing The Two Hunchbacks, Norman O’Neill’s Pastorale, and Bliss’s Pastoral.
With the exception of the last, which Richard Hickox has tellingly recorded, who hears of this stuff now? Here was a tasty chance to marvel at gems that fashion waywardly commits to the shadows.
There was more Bridge, together with Cecil Armstrong Gibbs and Charles (C. W.) Orr, in the Southern Sinfonia’s concert, conducted by David Hill. Where else, too, would you catch the Rhapsody for viola and piano by that Elgar stalwart (virtually his batman) W. H. (Billy) Reed: a stupendous violinist and viola-player to whom we partly owe the Elgar concerto. Who else figured on Paul Silverthorne’s mesmerising programme? Algernon Ashton and Benjamin Dale — names to conjure with.
Two outstanding vocal performers brought daylight enchantment: the tenor Ian Partridge in a Saturday-morning service in Keble College Chapel focusing on Sullivan, and James Bowman, who skitted around some tantalising, even spooky repertoire (including four Britten premières), adroitly abetted by Andrew Swait, one of that puckish trio of trebles marketed as The Choirboys.
Alongside Josef Holbrooke’s Celtic tone poem The Birds of Rhiannon, and Mackenzie’s ravishing orchestral Benedictus, brought beautifully to life by Barry Wordsworth and the BBC Concert Orchestra, high points of the week should have included the Uppingham-educated composer E. J. Moeran and his Wykhamist colleague, Sir George Dyson, of Canterbury Pilgrims fame.
Moeran’s E-flat quartet (which has been stunningly recorded by the Maggini Quartet on Naxos) needed no more articulate exponents than the Carducci Quartet. Fired by the biographer Barry Marsh’s perceptive lecture on Moeran, they lovingly wrapped this composer of Ireland, Norfolk, and the Welsh Marches in a shawl of Vaughan Williams’s two quartets. The second, puzzlingly, is rarely played.
Unfortunately, Dyson’s Agincourt floundered, quite unnecessarily. This noble former Director of Music at Winchester and Wellington could turn a big Three Choirs-type piece as brilliantly as Vaughan Williams, Finzi, or Britten. Agincourt is a rumbustious and moving choral work of the 1950s, composed two decades after The Canterbury Pilgrims. It sets Shakespeare’s Henry V, and the words are, of course, crucial.
As Paul Spicer, who is halfway through writing a biography of the composer, has observed, it is handsome and impressive; and Dyson’s hour-long oratorio Quo Vadis is more magnificent still. Sadly, the performance, by a choir recently lauded on these pages, verged on desultory. Heads buried in copies, they simply didn’t know the work. Some exquisite soprano solos (Alice Wratten) helped soothe us all through Elgar’s devilish Banner of St George.
The final event made amends: a rip-roaring concert conducted by Ronald Corp, including premières by Matthew Curtis, Cecilia McDowall, and Corp himself (a rather wandering Jubilate), in which Paul Carr’s new concerto for oboe and strings, with a meltingly lovely, elegiac slow movement, and David Owen Norris’s sparkling and exciting new piano concerto especially stood out.
The English Music Festival must liven up its marketing if it is to survive; and it deserves more radio coverage. It was a stupendous achievement, with its beautifully produced programme — an event to set beside the Finzi Friends’ inspiring Ludlow song festivals, and the Gloucester Three Choirs’ triumph in 2004. Get to the next one if you can.
www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk
|
back to Arts
previous story
|
next story 
back to top
