• Blog
  • Clients
  • About Me

Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Three Choirs Festival

Review: Gerontius at the Three Choirs

01 Tuesday Aug 2017

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, Elgar, Reviews, Roderick Williams, Three Choirs Festival, Worcester

Worcester Gerontius

Just before Prince Charles arrived

 

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (ideally you should go out and buy the paper) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Worcester Cathedral on Tuesday 25 July 2017.


There’s something very special about hearing The Dream of Gerontius in Worcester Cathedral during the Three Choirs Festival. “There is music in the air”, said Elgar: and when the very stones of the Cathedral seem to vibrate, as they did tonight when the organ held a deep, quiet pedal-note at the end of Part One, you can almost sense Sir Edward’s invisible presence.

So this performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Festival Chorus under Martyn Brabbins had a lot going for it even before a single note had been played. With the performers located (for the first time in many years) at the east end of the nave, the clarity and transparency of the orchestral sound was evident from the outset, as Brabbins gently blended the misty colours of Elgar’s Prelude.

That set the tone for a performance that was expansive (new layout or not, the Cathedral acoustic doesn’t allow much leeway on that front), but consistently lyrical and loving. David Butt Philip was almost a bel canto Gerontius, and while his voice felt perhaps too fresh for the dying man of Part One, his vocal radiance and sense of wonder made Part Two glow. As the Angel, Susan Bickley had “something too of sternness”, cresting her Alleluias like a Valkyrie – but found limitless compassion in her great Farewell. Roderick Williams was both a warmly expressive Priest, and a majestic Angel of the Agony.

Chorus and Orchestra responded in kind, with the Girl Choristers of Worcester Cathedral giving a gleaming golden top to a Festival Chorus whose pianissimos were luminous, even if they struggled for clarity in the Demons’ Chorus and Praise to the Holiest. But the spirit, clearly, was willing: and in The Dream of Gerontius, nothing matters more.

And relax…

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, Bliss, Elgar, Handel, Hereford, Longborough Opera, The Arts Desk, Three Choirs Festival

Wagner, Verdi and Mozart at Longborough.

Wagner, Verdi and Mozart at Longborough.

Well, not exactly; I’m working on a range of projects this month including programme notes for the Wigmore Hall, a feature on Mahler for the LPO, new orchestral biographies for the CBSO, and laying plans for an exciting new project for Amati Magazine (watch this space).

But things do generally get quieter on the concert scene in August, unless you’re in London or Edinburgh, and after a frantically busy 10 days, my last two long-range review missions will be my last for a couple of weeks, at any rate.

Longborough: dinner is served.

Longborough: dinner is served.

First was Longborough’s final show of the season: Handel’s Xerxes. It takes a lot to make me enjoy a Handel opera but this was…well, read my Birmingham Post review and see for yourself. Taken as a whole, I think it may even have been the most completely successful Longborough production (on all fronts) of the three I’ve seen this year. Longborough is like a little corner of operatic Eden: I’m going to miss that place (and not just for the people-watching and the picnics!)

Longborough - last night of the season.

Longborough – last night of the season.

And then on Monday, to Hereford, for the 300th Three Choirs Festival and a performance of Arthur Bliss’s choral symphony / war requiem Morning Heroes. A rarity like this makes a 180 mile round trip worth while; especially when the work is itself so noble, and the performance so committed. My review for The Arts Desk is here.

Elgar in Hereford.

Elgar in Hereford.

Out in the Cathedral close, Sir Edward Elgar had been suitably garlanded for the Festival week – he looked rather overwhelmed by the sudden attention, I thought.

003

It was good to catch up briefly with colleagues Chris Morley  and Clare Stevens (the Festival’s phenomenal one-woman Press & PR team) at the Cathedral. But these long-range reviews can be lonely affairs, so I’d taken Bliss’s memoirs As I Remember along with me for the trip. And as well as giving me an extra level of insight into the strange, dignified but deeply emotional neglected masterpiece that is Morning Heroes itself, this meant that I had the company of Sir Arthur himself over lunch in Ludlow and my late-night pizza in Hereford before the drive north. Did you know he’d received fan-mail from Webern, was a friend of James Joyce, bashed through the sketches of the Symphony in 3 Movements with Stravinsky, and played tennis with Schoenberg? Well, now you do.

Throwback Thursday: 300 years of the Three Choirs Festival

23 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Bliss, Elgar, Hereford Cathedral, Saint-Saens, Sibelius, Three Choirs Festival

Hereford Cathedral

The Three Choirs Festival celebrates its 300th anniversary this year, and on Monday next week I’ll be celebrating by fulfilling a long-held ambition and attending my first ever Three Choirs concert as an audience member – a rare chance to hear Bliss’s wonderful choral symphony Morning Heroes. The 300th Festival, as it happens, takes place in Hereford, and I’m actually quite looking forward to the westward drive out over the Malverns as well.

Like much that happens outside the magic circle of the M25, the Three Choirs is much misunderstood in some quarters – to read some coverage you’d think that it was nothing more than an Elgar-obsessed rural nostalgia-fest. That’s nonsense, of course – when I took the CBSO Youth Orchestra to the Festival in 2008 (Worcester that year) they didn’t bat so much as an eyelid at our programme of Arvo Part and Ligeti. The Festival has a list of major premieres (dating from long before, and long after, Sir Edward) that puts Aldeburgh and Cheltenham to shame. Here’s a short article I wrote for the CBSO about one of the more remarkable instances, in 1913.


1913: Luonnotar in Gloucester

When Elgar commented that “the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further north” he was stating a generally acknowledged fact. No-one in September 1913 would have considered it remarkable that the world premiere of Sibelius’s Luonnotar should be given in the Shire Hall, Gloucester during the Three Choirs Festival; or that the conductor should be the cathedral organist, Herbert Brewer.

Brewer’s commitment to new music was widely-known. A composer himself, he was on friendly terms with Elgar and Parry, and at one point had both Ivor Gurney and Herbert Howells in his choir. For the 1910 Festival, Brewer had commissioned Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia. And as early as 1909, he’d asked Sibelius – through their mutual friend (and later co-founder of the CBSO) Granville Bantock – to write something for the Festival.

So the premiere attracted attention across the UK. It was “probably [Sibelius’s] very latest work” reported The Times; “at any rate, when asked for the score and parts a fortnight ago, he replied to the Festival authorities that it was ‘still in his head’”. In fact, Sibelius had rehearsed Luonnotar with its dedicatee Aino Ackté before her departure for England. Billed as “New scena for soprano and orchestra”, Luonnotar was premiered on the evening of 10th September. Ackté received six curtain calls.

But the biggest ovation that night went to the Festival’s guest of honour: the 78-year old Camille Saint-Säens, who’d gamely agreed to perform a Mozart piano concerto. By all accounts, Saint-Säens was in ebullient mood, regaling colleagues with his celebrated impression of Cosima Wagner and posing for photographs with Elgar. He was up early the next morning to conduct the premiere of his oratorio The Promised Land, part of a marathon concert that also included new choral works by Stanford and Parry, and Elgar’s Symphony No.2 – then barely two years old.

Parry took the Frenchman to one side, quietly warning him not to expect unreserved enthusiasm from an English cathedral audience. And seated on chilly pews before their breakfast kedgeree had settled, the Gloucester audience might understandably have been a little subdued. But their willingness to turn out on a September morning to hear three solid hours of contemporary music shows that regional English audiences, then as now, took their music intensely seriously. Elgar had a point.

Contact Details

38 Beacon Street
Lichfield
United Kingdom
Staffordshire
WS13 7AJ

07754 068427

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Archives

  • June 2020 (1)
  • October 2019 (2)
  • January 2018 (1)
  • December 2017 (2)
  • November 2017 (2)
  • October 2017 (1)
  • August 2017 (2)
  • July 2017 (1)
  • June 2017 (3)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (2)
  • February 2017 (2)
  • December 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (3)
  • August 2016 (1)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (3)
  • March 2016 (6)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (3)
  • December 2015 (6)
  • November 2015 (4)
  • October 2015 (6)
  • September 2015 (5)
  • August 2015 (5)
  • July 2015 (8)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (12)
  • April 2015 (1)
  • February 2015 (1)
  • January 2015 (2)
  • December 2014 (4)
  • November 2014 (3)

Archives

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • Richard Bratby
    • Join 26 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Richard Bratby
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...