The roll call of 20th-century British composers featured at the Cheltenham Music Festival since its inception in 1945 makes impressive reading. Indeed, it forms a veritable who’s who, not just of composers but international artists and conductors too. This 78th Festival continues to create opportunities for musicians, as well as champion new work and features no fewer than 21 world premieres.
One such new work by Bedfordshire-based composer James B Wilson (born 1988) was given on the festival’s opening night at the Town Hall. A Cheltenham Music Festival Commission to mark the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan-Williams’ birth, Eden is scored for full symphony orchestra and combines the pastoralism of Vaughan Williams with rough-hewn, elemental associations that, according to Wilson, bear kinship with “the hardness and permanence of a rockface”. So no gentle rolling hills here, but a richly conceived curtain raiser of accumulating interest, perhaps more Cotswold stone than Welsh granite, but showcasing Wilson’s preoccupation with timbre and texture. Its visceral quality, with tiny echoes of Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, launched this eight-minute work which unfolded from bass trombone, percussion and low strings. Melodic shards and much timbral variety linked intermittent climaxes, the whole deftly handled by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under guest conductor Andrew Gourlay.
There followed an involving account of Richard Rodney Bennett’s Partita, a characterful three-part work for medium-sized orchestra prompted by a 1995 British Telecom commission. Variously buoyant, nostalgic and playful, the composer’s film music idiom was immediately evident in the work’s continually shifting panoramas, its natural melodic contours eloquently underlined by two heart-easing passages featuring viola and cello soloists. Warmth of expression was uppermost in the central Lullaby, its tenderness reflecting the memory of the composer’s much-loved friend Sheila MacCrindle, while the outer movements were shaped persuasively, Gourlay ensuring impeccable balance and rhythmic impetus.
No less engaging or quintessentially English were the airborne ruminations belonging to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, given an expressive outing by Tamsin Waley-Cohen. She imbued this “Romance” with considerable poise and subtlety, her self-communing notably creating a hall-stilling intimacy towards the close. There was much to admire in the sensitivity of the CBSO where gossamer strings, delicate winds and a tingling triangle provided a poetic backdrop to George Meredith’s eponymous poem.
After the interval Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony was given a shapely account, somewhat understated in the opening movement yet not without vivid detail and well-judged tempi. A chamber-like intimacy was kept in perfect balance for the Scene by the brook, nightingale, quail and cuckoo all charmingly evoked in the last bars, while emphatic rhythms accentuated the Merry gathering of country folk with woodwind and horn contributions catching the ear. There was no holding back from brass, piccolo and fearsome timpani to generate a strikingly dramatic storm, after which silky strings outlined a burnished “Hymn of Thanksgiving”. Gourlay coaxed handsome unanimity of tone from his forces and later generated an impressive tension to create a performance that was not just a supposed vision of Arcadia.
David's travel to Cheltenham was funded by the festival
