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The Midland's golden oldie Three Choirs Festival 2013 Gloucester ***** This year’s Three Choirs Festival, staged in
Gloucester under the Artistic Directorship of Adrian Partington, was a
high watermark of not just the Midland but the National summer concert
season. Never mind the BBC Proms: this spectacular
Musikfest, one of the biggest quality annual happenings on the
English music calendar, dates back to the early 1700s - its putative
tercentenary will be celebrated at Hereford under Geraint Bowen in 2015
– and alternates between three Midland cathedral cities, Gloucester,
Hereford and – next year - Worcester, where Peter Nardone’s first
Festival as Artistic Director will commemorate the 1914 World War I
anniversary. Coinciding with the Proms and Edinburgh, and hot
on the Cheltenham Festival’s heels, the Three Choirs showcases – above
all but by no means exclusively - choral music, drawing on a huge,
almost Proms-sized triple chorus. The Festival’s choice of soloists and quality of
performance is invariably stunning. Half the best talent, some of it
gifted twenty-somethings, from Covent Garden and elsewhere seem to have
migrated to Gloucester for the week. True we were missing two of the
superstars: tenor Andrew Kennedy, and mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, who
is masterminding the celebration of midland composer Ivor Gurney in
Gloucester on the last day of the month, were croaking and indisposed. But that did not stop Vladimir Ashkenazy – a star
since the 1950s when he shared the Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition first
prize with Britain’s John Ogdon –racing down, as big a name as the Three
Choirs has probably drawn since Sibelius, who turned up in 1913, Kodály
and of course Elgar. The Festival commissions; it promotes emerging talent, above all some formidably accomplished and incredibly well-trained home-grown young and community choirs; it offers a richly rewarding acoustic, or range of acoustics. Adrian Partington And it runs a host of other,
out-of-cathedral or late night in-the-cathedral events (like a varied
and, it must be said, qualitatively varied Gesualdo and Arvo Pärt
recital, following Stephen Layton and Polyphony, by a cappella
group Musica Beata): chamber concerts, song recitals by big names (James
Bowman, Catherine Bott, Roderick Williams, the celebrated if here – in
Hindemith’s Rilke-based Marienleben – fractionally underwhelming
yet operatically acclaimed mezzo Der-Shin Hwang), a complete new
community opera (The Bargee’s Wife) - such as few other
gatherings can hope to match. Now sporting a new General Manager, Dominic
Jewel, an instrumentalist of standing himself and clearly a dynamic,
highly capable successor to Paul Hedley, the frighteningly capable and
invaluable first full time head of secretariat, who masterminded the
detail and oversaw the change to a new, super-efficient central
administration coordinating and heading up the three centres, the Three
Choirs is, and remains, one of the finest managed large-scale events on
the musical calendar. Witness one small (well, big, actually) hiccup
this year. A fabulous new venue has come into being with the City
Council’s refurbishment last year of what survives of Gloucester’s
Blackfriars monastery: it’s England’s best-preserved medieval Dominican
priory, harking back to the 13th century; the massive atrium
now opened up there looks, and sounds, wonderful. Williams is a Three Choirs favourite. But come
his recital’s first half (songs by Richard Sisson, Nicholas Marshall,
American Jackson Hill, and a commission, Songs, from iconic
German composer Torsten Rasch, who will furnish next year’s choral
centrepiece at Worcester for the 1914 centenary), the noises-off became
absurd and almost unbearable. Why? It’s effectively a city centre venue. The singer took whirrs and bangs and crashes and
clinks of cascading bottles in his stride; and some of the audience did
too.
As a late night venue Blackfriars proved out of
this world, as with the brilliant, refined and characterful six-man
ensemble The Songmen, whose alto line, composer-arranger Ben Sawyer and
soaring Guy Lewis, is on a par with West Coast America’s famed
not-quite-gay group Chanticleer (soon after its founding the best a
cappella group in the world). Tenor Robert Murray’s replacing of the indisposed
Andrew Kennedy in a Britten song celebration and a spiky John O’Hara
premiere (see also his thrilling community opera below) provided the
number one choice of vocal connoisseurs. As with his Holy Sonnets of
John Donne, Britten can certainly do gloom, witness Williams’
earlier bracing but creepy rendition of Songs and Proverbs of William
Blake, as in ‘The Chimney-Sweeper’: ‘Because I was happy upon the
heath…They clothed me in the clothes of death.’ Not exactly cheery. Yet the Festival proved time and again that the
Midlands is, still, at the heart of English song, or Art Song. Witness
the three or four concerts each summer that make up Jennie
McGregor-Smith’s series Music at Tardebigge, outside Housman’s
Bromsgrove; or the magnificent feast of song that takes place,
triennially, as the Ludlow Festival of English Song, under the auspices
of the (Gerald) Finzi Friends, and which constantly showcases in the
Midlands’ western Marches the very peak of English song composers,
present and past, and song interpreters. So far from a Land ohne
Musik –Land without Music, as the Germans dubbed it, England at the
turn of the last century, plus before and after, was in fact home to
Austro-Germany’s mellifluous rival, the English Lied. But each time round the cathedral, whichever it
is that year, provides the heart of any Three Choirs Festival; and the
stupendous triple Festival Chorus – always impressive, and now
staggeringly improved under leaders like Partington – makes things whirr
musically. Witness the white haired Ashkenazy’s astonishing,
comically prim but always to the point, direction of the Philharmonia,
the orchestra now resident all week at the Three Choirs (another huge
selling point, for many might view them as intermittently the best in
England – and the same burgeoning, very much on-form chorus, in
Rachmaninov’s Edgar Allan Poe sequence – virtually a choral symphony -
The Bells, massive in this acoustic; and (again Ashkenazy) marvel
at Luonnotar, Sibelius’s exquisitely spare vocal lament actually
commissioned for the 1913 Three Choirs, with the moving Finnish soprano
Helena Juntunen making hair nerves tingle. The only irritation was having neither the
Russian words the choir and soloists sang (by Konstantin Balmont, though
we did of course have Poe’s original) nor the Finnish of the Sibelius.
To omit them from the quite superb Festival programme – a mine of
information - looked condescending. The Song of Hiawatha – impressively
featuring all three parts of it, under Worcester’s Peter Nardone,
as a belated tribute to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (died 1912) - is the
kind of programming a Three Choirs can risk once or twice in its seven
to nine evening span. Some found its – to me – touching tale musically
luke-warm.
The Festival’s Artistic Director, Adrian
Partington, organist of Gloucester Cathedral and one of the more
exciting, possibly excitable musical talents in the Midlands today,
pulled off two notable masterstrokes in programming: setting Brett
Dean’s endlessly subtle, jagged Berlin Philharmonic commission
Komarov’s Fall (the first cosmonaut to die in space, a bit like
English Touring Opera’s sad children’s tale Laika the Spacedog)
alongside a masterly Holst The Planets; and then having the
inspiration to preface Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius opening
with the work that nominally inspired it: Wagner’s Prelude to
Parsifal. The parallels are not exact, but in the Prelude
and much of the gentler music they are staggering (Elgar first saw
Parsifal – the wounded Sir Percival of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur
- twice, at Bayreuth in summer 1892, and two years later arranged
Wagner’s Good Friday Music for pupils at Worcester High School). But it was what followed that took the breath
away. A chorus director with awesome conducting experience (above all
with the BBC National Chorus and Orchestra of Wales), more than an equal
for Birmingham and Berlin’s own choral genius, Simon Halsey, Partington
found ingredients in Gerontius one had simply never spotted
before. Not so much his pacings as the quality of his inner ear, sensing
tension and signalling it before it even arose, reading the
undercurrents of the work, holding back where others might surge,
keeping a lid on things. Bass-baritone Matthew Rose, often unequalled,
seemed uneasy, even tentative in the (mightily and magnificently
reverberant) cathedral acoustic, misjudged it, started some passages
sharp, and seemed oddly out of sorts as the Priest, which needs (from a
previous generation) a Robert Lloyd or John Shirley-Quirk. One
preferred, a night earlier, the characterful South African-born Njabulo
Madlala, fresh from his triumph as Escamillo in Winslow Hall Opera –
formerly Stowe Opera’s – Carmen, in Belshazzar’s Feast:
one wished Walton had given his baritone more to do, for Madlala, always
expressive and characterful, made last year’s Community event buzz with
cheekiness, fun and sheer excellence. No such problems for Toby Spence: the exquisite
tenor nearly tragically cut down but now returned after illness, and one
of the most divine, ravishing young dying souls one is ever likely to
hear in Elgar’s once heavily-criticised Parsifalian work, now recognised
as one of his surpassing masterpieces. Above all, Estonian mezzo Kai
Rüütel as the Angel – beautiful to hear and scintillating to behold
(could he/she/it be more meltingly, grippingly sung than this?) lifted a
stupendously responsive, Philharmonia, rich in that palette of Elgarian
colours, and Partington’s Gerontius as a whole to one of the most
memorable ever, in or out of a Three Choirs context. And the Three
Choirs is Elgar’s Bayreuth. It deserved to be put on disc. Should Partington, who excitingly tackled Elgar’s
rarely-performed Falstaff symphonic poem which emerged glistening
and giggling – a bit like one long rampage by G. R. Sinclair’s
rumbustious bulldog Dan, immortalised in the Enigma Variations -
under his always intelligent baton, and with these fabulous forces in
Britten year, have programmed Gloriana, say; or looking ahead,
should he contemplate, unless solo line-up and economics prohibit,
Nielsen’s Saul and David, another opera-scale choral work that
cries out for a Three Choirs airing? I should just mention the ‘extra’ day – now in
fact made part of the Festival proper, but not one that sadly attracts
the usual punters. (Yet never mind, out come a completely different lot,
and the cathedral fills once again.) This year it was a brand new – though not stage -
community opera. The Bargee’s Wife, by the terrific, dynamiting
and energising composer-conductor John O’Hara. The Midlands’ waterways were, and are again today
in a different guise, its arteries, its nerve-complexes, and in a sense
the region’s emotional heart. The ticking, the slow chug-chug, of those
canal boats on the Grand Union, the Birmingham and Oxford, or through
the heartlands of Staffordshire, never ceases to touch a tender nerve. Part of the success of Pop and Folk legend
Barbara Dickson in singing, not always commandingly but always
touchingly, the title role is that she brought home the history, an
acutely specific sense of time and place, and the long march of time
itself between 1938 and the present day: like the Greek triple goddess
Aphrodite-Artemis-Hera, she is the young Bargee’s wife, later a middle
aged retiree looking back a quarter of a century later, and finally the
crone who watches a new generation of children play on what, as it were,
will soon be her grave.
Most moving of all is that though a proportion of
the text is her own – and cogent and telling it is – Hayes, by joining
the composer in tramping, Cecil Sharp-like, up and down the relevant
watery countryside, has taken passages of words from the memories of
those, now advanced in age and some suffering from dementia, who
remember the incident. Those who were the other children then. Thus ‘After the breakneck trip To deliver coal to
Coventry, or down to the paper mill at Croxley, Or to Braunstone
boatyard for painting fresh livery..’ or ‘Her pole, tightrope-walker’s
cane’ sit beside ‘Mud on her shoes and a printed dress’…‘I am secured by
my father’s thumbs’, ‘One of us drowned, …Slipped off the bank, Slid
down and drowned.’ You can sense the provenance: but which is the
achingly remembered, ebbing memory, and which the poet? It is this kind of intensity which makes The
Bargee’s Wife one of the best children’s operas I have never seen
staged. Two vocal soloists soared through the air, evoking past and
future, but the main soloists were the shimmering Philharmonia Orchestra
members, plus harp and keyboards, evincing a marvellous cycle of sounds
in O’Hara’s quite wonderful, often syncopated, vibrant score. None of this, music or script, talked down
to the performers. Only one thing did. I wouldn’t rush to ask Hayes,
credited as Director, even to semi-direct her own piece again. The
wonderful young Gloucester Cathedral Junior Choir, who sang with such
precision (alongside the very good part-community chorus: members of
Newent Scottish Singers, Severnside Singers, Gloucester Choral Society,
the Ecclesiastical (Insurance) Staff Choir and the Cheltenham Bach
Choir) the fading memories of the former playmates they were, not
surprisingly, a key element were hopelessly directed. They were left
looking feeble, vapidly inventing, flailing; and children are not
feeble, do not flail, least of all at drama. You cannot have a community event, now
excellently deemed part of the Festival proper, and allow it to be the
weediest occasion visually in the whole bonanza. The point is to lift
the community to standards it did not realise it could attain. One more, concomitant gripe: the Junior and
Community Choir events which form part of ‘Three Choirs Plus’ were
inadequately indicated - the main Youth Chorus concert apart - in not
just the preliminary Booking Form or brochure, but in the Programme
itself. Though there was a small leaflet one could pick up listing them,
one might as well say: ‘Superfluous: don’t bother going.’ Switching from
one publication to another is infuriating anyway. But here, for ‘Three
Choirs Plus’ you could read ‘Three Choirs, but not really.’ You do not
sideline youngsters, let alone your own; or if you do, you so at peril
of your soul. 08-13 Roderic Dunnett
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But within an hour executive committees galvanised, quickfire
decisions were taken, platforming got shifted – a major reorganisation -
to an acoustically superior central position; future song recitals will
be relocated to the previous more intimate, more sleepy church venue
(equally ancient St. Mary de Lode) to counter any recurrence. 
I thought the last section (‘Hiawatha’s Departure’), apart
from a few Christian overtones more tiresome Britten’s Lucretia,
infinitely superior to the preceding popular hit, Hiawatha’s Wedding
Feast. The Afro-Caribbean-sprung composer could structure; and he
could score: two reasons why Elgar championed him. The choir went for
broke, and sounded pretty thrilling even when the composer’s inspiration
or tautness lagged a bit, or a lot. 
The whole work is a kind of Requiem for Solomon
Pavy, with shades of the similar ditties in John Tavener’s landmark
1960s work Celtic Requiem. (If one had to cite or compare another
modern work, it would be Steve Reich’s mesmerising Different Trains,
with its groped-after echoes of the Holocaust.)