Imagine the Salzburg Festival where the only Mozart
performed is Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and a group of songs; or Bayreuth
when the only Wagner performed is the Siegfried Idyll and the Wesendonck
songs? No? Then what about this year's Aldeburgh Festival when the only music
of Britten heard was the Chinese Songs, Winter Words and some of
his early film scores? Oh yes and there was also a talk entitled ' Ben, Peter,
Imo and Co.' by somebody with the same name as myself. Still, a pretty meagre
crop. But with a director who confessed that his reaction to the music of Benjamin
Britten was "neutral', what you expect is what we get.
As a pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, however, is first class
as he has shown again and again. He was brilliant this year, for example, in
Bartok's Sonata for two pianos and percussion and, indeed, in anything
he played, including Elliott Carter's Interventions, composed when the
American composer was approaching his 100th birthday. This substantial piece
was played with the City of Birmingham Symphony conducted with his usual
mastery by Oliver Knussen, himself celebrating a birthday, his 60th.
O.K. also brought vividly to life two Ives works, the Fourth
of July shenanigan and the wonderful Three Places in New England.
Bartok's Three Village Scenes (with small female chorus) was a
delightful and rarely heard item. Also heard was Harrison Birtwistle's Cantus
Iambeus a short work that confirmed his radio statement:
"I am not in the entertainment business " (as if we didn't know!). Knussen's own
Requiem for Sue (his wife) was eloquently sung by the soprano Dawn
Upshaw.
Great imagination and innovation was shown in an unusual
entertainment directed by Netia Jones: three song cycles were sung (and
touchingly mimed) by James Gilchrist, tenor of excellence, while decorative and
illuminating film went on behind him. All three had to do with childhood and
early adulthood: Britten's aforementioned Winter Words, dramatic
vignettes that miraculously add an extra dimension to Hardy's poems, Finzi's
more homely and almost parochially English A Young Man's Exhortation
(also Hardy) and Michael Tippett's cantata Boyhoods End, words by the
naturalist W.H. Hudson that recall his childhood in South America, Far Away
and Long Ago.
Peter Pears wrote at the time when he premiered the work in
1943 with Britten at the piano, the piece shows "that innovative and
radiant fantasy" of Tippett. Gilchrist coped effortlessly, with the
coloratura and awkward intervals and Anne Tilbrook did the same with the piano
part (which provoked Britten to write to the composer "I wish your piano
parts weren't so difficult".)
Other festive delights were the Keller Quartet's fine
playing of Bartok's quartets and several transcriptions of Bach and two
evenings of unaccompanied choral works: the Monteverdi Choir in an uplifting
trawl through early English church scores: Byrd, Tallis, Tomkins and the lesser
known but wonderful Robert White (1538 – 1574). Gesualdo's religious music was
beautifully tuned and toned by the Callegium Gent direction by Philippe
Herreweghe (some could have appreciated a group of some spicy madrigals rather
than a whole evening of the penitential Good Friday music that we were given.)
It was interesting to compare the style of the two ensembles: John Eliot
Gardiner's was more dramatic and passionate, Herreweghe's (appropriately of
course) more staid and, erm!, Belgian.
The veteran pianist Menahem Pressler (remember him all
those years in the Beaux Arts Trio, one of the great chamber music groups of
our time?) played Mozart, Lv B, Chopin and Schubert (the last Sonata in B flat)
and gave consummate pleasure. The high point was the pianissimo singing of
Chopin's D flat Nocturne, opus 27/2; the sound and shaping ravished the ear –
bliss! Alfred Brendel's fingers came out of retirement to illustrate his
lecture on Liszt with works he hasn't played in for public for donkey's years.
Other pianists included Peter Serkin's rather penitential first half of present
day conundra and a magisterial account of LvB's masterly Diabelli Variations;
and an enterprising replica of the piano recital that Bela Bartok gave to some
no doubt bewildered school girls in 1923 (they can't have known what hit them
as the Hungarian arch-modernist regaled them with his early extremely
rebarbative pieces of that time.) The excellent pianist was Tatiana
Stefanovich, the Jugoslav musician, who had earlier partnered Aimard in Bartok
Sonata.
A feature of the Festival, as usual, was that some of the concerts took place in venues away from the Maltings in Snape, the unique Blythburgh Church with its painted angels on the roof, the machine vault in Leiston where the piano stood next to a vintage locomotive, Orford's spacious church, and the school hall where Bartok had earned his £15 – fee nearly ninety years ago.
It should be mentioned, finally, that next year, the
centenary of Britten's birth, the planners are actually going to programme
several works by the Suffolk genius, including Peter Grimes on the
beach! (bring your sou'westers).
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