Planet Extra - Wales en Fête

Wales en Fête

05.11.09

How many music festivals make a summer? Even before the first notes of the Welsh Proms, the sounds of annual musical junketings were rustling and jostling in the air all around our fair land. And for the first time, BBC Radio 3 sent an expeditionary force to see what was happening. In effect if not intention, the BBC team was the cultural equivalent of Ofsted. In my imagination I see a state-of-the-Arts mobile recording unit setting out from Imperial Classical Music HQ in Broadcasting House, in front of them a taxing journey, trekking around Welsh highways and byways. Indeed, even veteran expeditionaries may at times have felt they were operating in conditions as challenging as those posed by the upper reaches of the Orinoco. Being a complete innocent in such matters, I wonder at their science in adjusting local venue acoustics to the fidgety requirements of the widely-contrasting musical forces involved in each concert. For example, four of the five broadcasts touched on below took place in medieval churches of different dimensions, climatic ambience and audience capacity. Results were not always perfect, but nevertheless, with the ongoing explosion of radio access, listeners were able to make their own quality-control assessments whilst simultaneously speeding along a motorway, taking a coffee break in the City, slopping out Salisbury Plain, roamin' in the Grampian gloamin', or even para-gliding over the Brecon Beacons.

To judge from the broadcasts heard in September, music performance in Wales is in robust health. The main venue Auntie overlooked was one of the longer-established, at Fishguard. I suspect this was something to do with Abergwaun's opting to celebrate "The Year of the Three Composers", since that's already receiving saturation attention on Radio 3. But the German liturgy was notably present everywhere. Messiah (for example) was invoked to part the clouds hovering over St Asaph as well as St David's, and no other festival committee dared to turn its faces wholly against the Big Three of Handel (d. 1759), Haydn (d. 1809) and Mendelssohn (b. 1809). St. David's Cathedral now has its own festival, presumably the result of a past declaration of independence from Fishguard. Nonetheless, the Dean displays commendable eucumenicism (and consideration for the Restoration Fund) in allowing his sanctuary to be used for Fishguard concerts as well as its own. As part of the latter, the cellist Natalie Clein included two of J S Bach's solo suites in a recital which also featured a Kodaly sonata new to your columnist. She produced some exquisite and challenging sounds but also some confused and jumbled ones. I got the impression that dance music, still redolent of courtly demeanour in Bach's day but deliberately de-civilized by Kodaly and Bartok, doesn't suit the cello as it certainly does the fiddle. The ecstatic excitement of a Hungarian bash doesn't come across in its solo register. Just add more nimble company — as in the Presteigne concert with the Carducci Quartet — and the final movements of Haydn's op. 20 no. 4 whirl around and rush hither and thither. The Festival held at the church of Llanandras is certainly international in that punters can stroll into England and back during concert intervals, but it's better known for generous and sustained encouragement of Welsh composers. Tenor James Gilchrist joined the Carduccis for a performance of Huw Watkins's absorbing new version of In My Craft or Sullen Art. An aurally sensuous extended nocturne, the piece has undertones of two celebrated modern exponents of that genre, Bartok and Britten — but as the composer might justly remark, "any fool can see that". Watkins had the notion of coping with Dylan Thomas's many levels of inference about love and creation, poetry and sex by setting the words twice over: in (I fancy) "objective" and "subjective" modes. He conveys superbly the poet's concentrated fretting, the sudden violent crossings-out, the obsessive chewing of the pencil-end. It's a work of timeless empathy, not least (to a weary sceptic like myself) for its resonance with the poet's doubts about the value and meaning of his craft, floating sullenly alone, "the moon raging", in the indifferent waters of a sceptical society.  

Lower Machen hosts the smallest but also the most venerable of Wales's music festivals. This year's event was the latest in an unbroken sequence stretching back for 42 years. How bitterly unrequited must music-lovers of rural Gwent have felt in 1967, how blissful the release of pent-up feelings provided by the heroic founders of the festival! At last the life-giving stream, the Bachs of all those Bachgen, the Bachlein of Franz Schubert and Richard Strauss, had come to irrigate their cultural desert. And Bach it was again this year, though in the most extraordinary disguise heard since the days of Jacques Loussier — as I recall, approximately 1967. The recital given by Catrin Finch can only be described as monumental: and I rashly claim a novelty in using this word about a solo harp concert. The broadcast consisted entirely of the Goldberg Variations arranged for harp by the soloist, a labour of staggering ambition, effort and ingenuity. Nothing like it has been attempted since the Marx brothers demolished a grand piano on the deck of a transatlantic liner, allowing Harpo a technically impossible impromptu encore (A Night at the Opera, 1935). It is said that the noble person who commissioned JSB in the first place was hoping to find a cure for his insomnia: but Ms Finch's audience had probably never been more awake in their lives as they were drawn into the astonishing sound-world she summoned up. In the inaugural of these effusions some months ago your columnist remarked on Mendelssohn's less than happy opinion of the ubiquitous trad Welsh harpist. But the Catrin Finch experience would surely win over the very man without whom Bach may never have been rediscovered and established as the most canonical of all musical canons. Was the result a shade too light in substance, a little too luminous in texture? Quibbles. Should the pauses between variations have been a tad shorter, for here and there it seemed more like a multi-movement suite than an integral work, which —though of course not durchkomponiert — yet has an overarching momentum, pulse and logic greater than the sum of its parts? Casuistry. What really worries me is Ms Finch's future health. If she were to play this epically achieved but intolerably demanding work too often, the demon of arthritis might hover. Let her record it ASAP, and then reserve it for the grandest occasions. She can quote as authority in every dimension the greatest Goldberger of them all, the late Glenn Gould.

The powerfully-denominated North Wales International Music Festival still exercises a monopoly over aficionados from Gwynedd and the northen borderlands. It brought the Festival summer to a dying fall on September 25, with a live broadcast from St Asaph cathedral of a capella music. The evening began with two highly-wrought pieces by Thomas Tompkins, arguably Wales's only claim to a major Renaissance figure. But my composure about this composer was rudely upset when the announcer's script told us that "he may have been born in St. David's but he didn't live there long enough for us to call him a Welsh composer." Had some officious backroom BBC barrister come up with this uncalled for remark? According to Wikipedia, Tompkins lived in St. David's for his first 14 years, and very possibly until he reached 22. Still, let's remain composed about this: nationality is after all an accident of birth — if often a happy accident.

The only secular site in the BBC's itinerary was Gregynog Hall near Newtown. Ironically, the late Professor Ian Parrott gave his essential but very boring book about the Gregynog Festival's history the title The Spiritual Pilgrims. The phrase neatly conveys the religiose devotion which Art-Music evoked in the 1930s, when the millionairess Davies sisters started (and paid for!) a festival — an experiment twice since aborted and re-conceived. In this "low, dishonest decade", while most of Wales struggled to live by bread alone, English composers and players enjoyed country-house comforts and refreshing music-making, and wondered at Rodin's bronze bust of Mahler, ("...was there really another composer called Gustav?"). The broadcast concert was mainly Handel, with counter-tenor Iestyn Davies (presumably no relation) and harpsichordist Gary Cooper (ditto). Handel's cantata Non puó mia musa originated as a shameless piece of self-advertisement. He set a poem written in his praise by a Prince of the Church, in which Orpheus, Pagan Patron of Music, is compared unfavourably with the composer who left Germany at the age of 20, refused offers from Italy, and finally opted to play for England.

Hecklephone