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Music: Three Choirs Festival at Hereford

by
12 August 2022

Roderic Dunnett gives his round-up of this year’s feast of music

© G. L. Shooters

Geraint Bowen, artistic director of this year’s Three Choirs Festival, conducted Dvořák’s Requiem

Geraint Bowen, artistic director of this year’s Three Choirs Festival, conducted Dvořák’s Requiem

ALTERNATING between the three cathedral cities of Gloucester, Hereford, and Worcester, the Three Choirs Festival, this year at Hereford, was at one time sometimes — ludicrously — regarded as fusty, fuddy-duddy, and outmoded.

Happily, views of the festival have long changed. The musical standards of its packed occasions — sometimes as many as seven concerts a day — are recognised as of top quality, to match the country’s best: not surprisingly, given that the Philharmonia Orchestra is in residence annually.

Alongside the big evening concerts, the chamber, vocal, and early music (Fretwork promoting Purcell’s predecessor Matthew Locke, Robert Hollingworth’s I Fagiolini in the beauteous John Wilbye, hunks of Hildegard of Bingen), and the late-night concerts, prominence is given, naturally, to organ recitals.

The Australian Alana Brook introduced Joséphine Boulay (1869-1925), a pupil of César Franck, and Ripon Misericords, Philip Wilby’s expertly crafted six miniatures celebrating the restoration of one of that cathedral’s glories. The prizewinning Callum Alger brightened his recital with Alfred Hollins’s A Song of Sunshine (a tongue-in-cheek bonbon). The Hereford-born, internationally acclaimed Henry Fairs expounded Elgar’s dazzling Sonata.

Guildford’s Michael Stephens-Jones flaunted a Chorale and Variations by the Netherlands’ Toon Hagen, and most vividly explored the fascinating Hovingham Sketches, a conglomeration of pieces by eight composers, including the late Francis Jackson (1917-2022), and the mesmerising “Chimes” by Bernard Rose.

Youth nowadays has entered the core of the Three Choirs. The National Youth Orchestra of Wales launched into a massively energetic overture, Argentum (the “silver” denoting 25 years of Classic FM) by the Hong Kong-born Dani Howard. Erich Korngold’s scintillating Violin Concerto (1945) received as incisive a reading from this youthful ensemble as from its enchanting soloist, Jennifer Pike.

But the star of this concert was certainly the conductor, Kwamé Ryan, originally from Trinidad. What sensitivity, what masterful control, what intense interaction with, and understanding of, his young charges! This was equally so in Rimsky-Korsakov’s ravishing Scheherazade.



THERE is always a hefty concert featuring the three cathedral choirs. Here, they set about a giant: Haydn’s The Creation. To hear such rare, pure singing in “The Heavens are telling” or “Achieved is the glorious work”, especially with the finely articulated period instruments of the Musical and Amicable Society, was a treat indeed. Delivering Gottfried van Swieten’s memorable text, the tenor Gwilym Bowen (the archangel Uriel) and the baritone David Stout (Raphael), both rich in character, shone as always, plus Joanne Lunn (Gabriel), the latter two reappearing as Adam and Eve. Geraint Bowen, fully au fait with text as well as music, conducted and eloquently shaped the whole.

The main festival (co-)commission was Voices of Power, a 40-minute choral and orchestral sequence, conjured up by the composer Luke Styles, with a libretto by Jessica Walker, who sports an equally impressive CV.

Let it be conceded straight away that in 12 minutes Judith Weir’s Latin text All the ends of the earth — joyously celebrating that prototype Notre-Dame de Paris composer Pérotin, and sung by the amazingly competent and well-trained Three Choirs Youth Choir — had, it might be argued, rather more to offer than the marathon festival commission that followed (which, it should be said, however, was well received).

This was one of three evening concerts in which length proved a bit over-extended. Walker has woven together a text in which she illumined, by means of a somewhat feminist saga, seven women whose lives displayed exemplary courage and determination: Boudicca, the Iceni queen who took on the Romans; Queen Elizabeth I; Russia’s Catherine the Great; Eleanor Roosevelt, champion of human rights; Margaret Thatcher; Hillary Clinton; and the New Zealand premier Jacinda Ardern.

Walker’s poetry is expressive and unfaultable: short-lined, rich in vocabulary and irony. But add in Styles’s music, which, albeit spirited and well-intentioned, failed adequately to differentiate these historical figures, and the whole enterprise becomes quite a wade.

Yet his orchestral interludes struck me as especially appealing. There are moments of instrumental lightness or thinning, too; touches of coloratura violin solo over brass underlay; amd sprightly hints of Stravinsky’s neo-classical 1940s symphonies. Styles’s quite bold intermittent modernism I found no problem with — in fact, I enjoyed. Some bars even suggested the meticulous post-serialist tautness of Maxwell Davies, interspersed with Sprechstimme (semi-intoned spoken utterances). Nothing fuddy-duddy about this.

So, even although this extravaganza sported the magnificent, vast-ranging lyric contralto Hilary Summers, it proved not exactly a hit structurally, and yet not a failure, either. It is remarkable how many new or newish works surface annually. This year: Joseph Phibbs; the deliciously Romantic David Matthews; Cheryl Frances-Hoad in a mainly Baltic-Scandinavian programme; or even a string quartet by Ina Boyle (1889-1967).

 

BUT the highlights? Dvořák’s radiant, enthralling, intensely pious, and yet rarely performed Requiem is consistently beautiful, even if, at 95 minutes, embedded in some needless repetition, and perhaps an over-use of its knotty, Bach-like motif, a fractionally overlong setting. Usually overshadowed by Verdi, it was brought fabulously and sensitively to life by Geraint Bowen. Indeed, Bowen’s conducting, subsequently more subdued, but here flamboyant, sweeping, endlessly varied, expressive, and original, was, for me, a highlight in itself.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 was preceded by a UK première, Rolf Martinsson’s cycle Ich denke dein, a setting daringly rooted in those poets of Schubert or Schumann, Goethe and Eichendorff, but also parading some wondrous lines from Rilke.

Other top-of-the-range performances were the Philharmonia’s sparkling playing of Britten’s The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, and, regrettably at late night, Stephen McNeff’s psychologically acute hour-long opera Beyond the Garden. McNeff’s The Burning Boy, for young people, made a magnificent contribution to the 2019 festival.

Poulenc’s Stabat Mater (1951), recalling, sadly, his recently dead gay friend, the artist Christian Bérard, felt as pure as a bubbling stream: passionate, agonised, and yet also optimistic, its choruses profoundly refined, and the whole work revealed by Adrian Partington as the masterpiece that it is. The soprano Elizabeth Watts, once a very young star, swooped too much, but there is some logic here, and she proved profoundly moving in the Poulenc’s eerie Andante “Vidit suum”, and especially at “Sancta Mater”.

Adrian Partington’s remarkable early-week retrieval from obscurity was the (again too long, but intriguing) Quo Vadis, by (Sir) George Dyson, a large-scale (90-minute) oratorio, or cycle in nine movements, written before the Second World War and planned for Hereford in 1939, but its première delayed, inevitably, to a post-war festival (Hereford, 1949). Some found it platitudinous, even dull, perhaps its philosophy addled; but I didn’t, and nor did Dyson’s eminent biographer, Paul Spicer.

© G. L. ShootersThe four soloists in Dyson’s Quo Vadis, conducted by Adrian Partington

Quo Vadis is based not on Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Polish novel, but on a wealth of poetic sources (Herrick, Herbert and Vaughan, Blake, and Shelley): a rich, wonderfully rewarding text, especially that by John Keble (”The glorious sky, embracing all, Is like the Maker’s love. . .”). Dyson was deeply torn between adherence to some kind of Christianity and to spirituality exploring a more abstract philosophical outlook. The work starts very unexpectedly, and attractively, embracing Debussy and sundry Impressionists. All four soloists were sensational, outshining even the fabulous orchestral playing.

Heard near by in the Benedictine Belmont Abbey, Two Souls, by Robert Peate, is a fascinating exposé (for four harps, organ, a pair of narrators, and chamber choir) of the lives of two fourth-century figures from ancient Alexandria: the martyr St Katherine and the neoplatonist sage Hypatia. With six pages of text, yet here surprisingly not too sprawling, interspersed with “a kind of Greek chorus”, deliberately hybrid in musical style, with at its heart Wesley’s hymn Hereford (“O thou who camest from above”), it is hugely unusual and intriguing, mapping out its highly affecting, intermingled duple story.

But the supreme success of the week was, without doubt, Richard Blackford’s oratorio Pietà. Preceded by the orchestra’s intensely moving rendition of Richard Strauss’s lament for flattened, burnt-out Munich and Dresden, his 23-string Metamorphosen, written in 1944 — a marvel, spaciously nursed by Worcester’s Samuel Hudson — this was as moving as any performance I have heard, live or on disc. Before came Bach, arranged with such subtlety by Anton Webern that the mainly legato parts, especially intricately varied wind, were miraculously differentiated. Why some listeners found it difficult or even ugly I can’t understand. It is a masterpiece, infinitely preferable to Stravinsky’s lumpen Bach arrangement.

But every note of Blackford’s Pietà registered depth, insight, sensitivity, richness, and sheer beauty. Here is a modern work that looks both backward and forward, and is of our (post-modern) times, but fresh, innovative, and opulent in its constant reaching out to lend glory to his chosen texts: an original interplay between the Stabat Mater and anguished lines by the Russian (Soviet) poet Anna Akhmatova (1889-1996). Akhmatova’s husband perished in Stalin’s purges; her son disappeared, she not knowing whether he was dead or alive. In other words, this is a very modern Stabat Mater, whose two soloists included another incredible contralto, Jess Dandy.

Blackford’s folding in of a soprano saxophone is a stroke of genius, not least when set against soloists or even chorus. Amy Dickson’s saxophone playing was truly miraculous, shining through the first entry of the baritone (Roderick Williams), a delicious scherzo, and constantly throughout. The word repetition at “Eia mater” and imitations in the first Akhmatova poem are enhancing, never ponderous, and his use of children’s chorus (“Sancta Mater, istud agas”) was among countless touching and beautifully crafted passages.

One could go on. Pietà is a masterly composition, and absolutely deserves to be savoured by numerous adventurous choral societies. Blackford has also written three other major choral works: Not in our Time, Mirror of Perfection, and Voices of Exile. Every one is admirable and hugely to be commended. Samples can be found at www.blackford.co.uk.

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