Sala: St Andrew's Church, Presteigne

A concert built on the work of composers from Britain, Finland and Latvia formed a rewarding programme of choral, vocal and orchestral music with several gems. 

The Presteigne Festival went Polish this year with an enterprising perspective of contemporary and post-war works including the world première of Paveł Łukaszewski’s newly commissioned Requiem. 

Benjamin Britten was very precise about what constituted the official canon of his works, but, in addition to his stipulated 95 opus numbers, he composed a huge amount of occasional music.

To those who grew up with Michael Tippett’s music and lived through the later premières, the neglect into which he has fallen and the ill-disguised contempt of many is both puzzling and distressing. The same fate befell both Sibelius and Vaughan Williams in the years following their deaths and now, fifteen years on, there is perhaps just a faint glimmer of a Tippett reappraisal on the horizon.

The classification of composers into those who write tonal music and those who inhabit the harder-edged shores of serialism and atonality raised its head once again at the first of the three concerts given by the Festival Chamber Orchestra at this year’s Presteigne Festival.

The Presteigne Festival has carved out a niche amongst Welsh Festivals (or, indeed, British festivals as a whole) for its largely contemporary programme of work.