CityLife

Chamber Music Festival

Chamber Music Festival
Royal Northern College Of Music
January 7 to 10, 2010

THE Royal Northern College’s annual chamber music festival defied the arctic conditions and carried through its theme of music of the British Isles.

It would have been ironic, as artistic director Jeremy Young pointed out at the opening concert, if a festival of British music had had to be cancelled because of the weather.

There was a wealth of well-loved native music played (and sung), and some lesser-known corners of the repertory explored, and one special aspect of the programme was its sequence of world premieres. If it’s British music you’re listening to, composers keen to add to the tradition are, after all, close at hand.

Ah, but what tradition? I heard four of the major new pieces on offer, and it’s clear that British music today has no single line of descent. 

Enchanting

Anthony Gilbert’s String Quartet no. 5, introduced by the Heath Quartet betwixt Britten and Elgar, was described by its composer as ‘a relaxed, wide-open work’ and its single-movement, lyrical line and swaying rhythms rose and fell in intensity mainly through changing textures in a seamless whole.

Adam Gorb’s String Quartet no. 2 could hardly have offered a greater contrast. Premiered by the Apponyi Quartet, it fell into four clearly delimited sections within its 11-minute total, changing speed and character each time. More than once it seemed to search after the wistful, viola-solo meditative quality that is to some the essence of Englishness. Tantalisingly, it deserted those moments of sunlit beauty almost as soon as it discovered them.

John Turner and Craig Ogden’s programme included a new song cycle by Stephen Dodgson called Riley & Co., sung by Terence Ayebare. The poems, by Charles Causley, evoke enchanting little worlds of their own, to which the music (recorder and guitar accompanying the voice) has to add little but atmosphere and an enigmatic quality in its closes – which it does effectively. It makes a congenial companion piece for John Manduell’s Into The Ark (already recorded by Turner and Ogden with Claire Bradshaw as soloist), which was also in this programme.

Robin Walker’s At The Grave Of John O’Brien, for recorders and guitar alone, was written as an In Memoriam and had a powerful impact in performance. As a musical expression of loss and grief, with real feeling, thoughtfulness and a desolate coda, I found it spoke deeply.