Southwell Music Festival 2024. Southwell Minster and other venues, 23 – 26 August 2024, 5✩✩✩✩✩. Review: William Ruff

Photo Credit: Joe Briggs-Price.

Southwell Music Festival 2024

Southwell Minster and other venues

23 – 26 August 2024

5✩✩✩✩✩

Review: William Ruff

“The Southwell Music Festival: a distinctive and rewarding experience.”

There’s always a warm welcome at the Southwell Music Festival. The pre-concert greetings are an integral part of the Festival vision: rather than selling a product in the cultural marketplace, it offers an experience which enriches in ways that are both distinctive and rewarding.

You see the difference in people’s eyes: the box office staff, the small army of volunteers who meet, greet and help. You see it in the eyes of Marcus Farnsworth, the Festival founder and director who bounds onto the stage at the start of each event, launching with palpable enthusiasm both audience and performers on a shared voyage of exploration. And, of course, you see it in the eyes of the many artists who really do look as if they are enjoying themselves.

Festival Apprentices

The warmth and reassurance of this year’s welcome was particularly appreciated by those who battled through gale-force winds to attend the opening event. The famous Chapter House has been, for the last few years, the kernel from which everything has rapidly grown. Its very air encourages music to breathe and bloom, the beneficiaries this year being the Genesis Quartet, the four Festival Apprentices whose 9.30am Italian Job concert transported the audience to the world of sixteenth century Italian madrigals.

The Quartet immediately plunged their listeners into an Italian landscape inhabited by characters who experience everything at the very limits of emotion, from the depths of despair to the dizzy heights of joy. The music is complex and frequently surprising, each short piece representing the passionate, often temperamental nature of the composers themselves. The strength of the Gemini Quartet’s performance lay not only in the lovely well-balanced sounds they produced but also in their understanding of the relationship between words and music.

Friday morning also saw another concert given by Festival Apprentices: the Sonas Quartet playing Schumann’s Quartet op. 41 no.1, Three Pieces by Stravinsky and Janacek’s 1st String Quartet, the one called ‘The Kreutzer Sonata’. All three pieces were played without a break, no mean feat of stamina as well as musicality. The Janacek piece forms a turbulent musical drama, full of passion, violence and the sort of energy which grabs you by the throat and won’t let you go. The Sonas Quartet gave a blistering performance.

English Song

Three back-to-back events on Saturday afternoon may sound like too much of a good thing – but they were simply irresistible. First came the great British tenor Mark Padmore and a programme of English songs, settings of great words (Keats, Housman, Shakespeare, Rossetti etc) by composers such as Stanford, Butterworth, Howells and Tippett. Padmore is a sort of Ancient Mariner of the musical world, holding the audience with his glittering eye and making each song into an intense, individual drama, the words carrying as much weight as the music. In the opening song La Belle Dame Sans Merci, we heard (and saw) the wonder of discovering a ‘faery’s child’, the ecstasy of love, and the chilling horror of the beautiful lady’s victims. Mark Padmore ended his recital with Benjamin Britten’s song cycle Winter Words, a setting of eight poems by Thomas Hardy, the singer’s attention to poetic detail as precise as his singing of Britten’s often very demanding music. Pianist Libby Burgess provided exemplary, insightful accompaniment throughout.

Lord Byron

Next stop: Southwell Methodist Church and a talk on Byron in Southwell, given by Geoffrey Bond, one of the world’s foremost experts on the poet, someone who owns an extraordinary Byron collection – and who owns Burgage Manor, the house once lived in by Byron. Everyone knows the ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ Byron, as well as the hero who died fighting for the liberation of Greece. This talk focused on aspects of his life that are far less well known, such as his impoverished childhood in Scotland. More than anything we were taken into Byron’s life in Southwell. Of all the many pictures with which Geoffrey Bond illustrated his talk, perhaps none was as compelling as those of the Manor itself and of Geoffrey Bond working amid the treasures of his library.

Byron was again the focus of the following event: Don Juan – The Brilliant Irreverence of Lord Byron, a ‘concert play’ devised, written and performed by the award-winning actor and director Tama Matheson, together with Clare Hammond, one of the UK’s leading pianists. This 90-minute music drama was a tour de force, starting with a dishevelled Byron gossiping to the audience from his chaise longue and ending with his painful death in Greece. Clare Hammond injected music by composers as diverse as Beethoven, Debussy, and Hélène de Montgerould into the torrent of Byron’s words, always to precise and poignant effect. At the centre of the drama was Byron’s Don Juan, a vast poem, still as funny and as shocking as it was in the 1820s. It inspired an extraordinary display of creative energy from both artists.

Tenth Anniversary Concert

The Festival’s central event has always been the big choral concert staged by the Festival Voices and Sinfonia under the baton of Marcus Farnsworth. Always one of the most eagerly anticipated musical events of the year, this Tenth Anniversary concert was special in many ways. For a start, those who attended Libby Burgess’s pre-concert talk The Myths and the Music about Mozart’s Requiem were treated to a masterclass on how to present music.

The concert itself began with the world premiere of With What Sudden Joy by Cheryl Frances-Hoad set to texts by Kate Wakeling. It’s a piece which explores the joy and power of music, the words drawn from the experiences of local people who have turned to music both at times of celebration and when experiencing feelings of deep loss. The marriage of such simple, sincere words with music which reaches so deeply into the human spirit made this a moving work which many will want to hear again. Soprano Alison Rose together with the sensitive, wholly committed choir and orchestra could not have been more powerful advocates.

Mozart’s Requiem has been a pillar of the choral repertoire for over two centuries but made to seem new-minted in this Festival performance conducted with rigorous attention to detail by Marcus Farnsworth. The line-up of soloists was impressive: Alison Rose, Susan Bickley, Mark Padmore and Frederick Long. Together with the Festival Voices and Sinfonia they produced an account which blended power and gravitas with stylistic finesse and lightness of touch. The dark-hued sonorities of the score were brought out superbly and the small, hand-picked choir sang with passion and precision.

Sadly, for every fine Festival performance one attends there are at least three which one cannot - and there are plenty of people eager to tell you of the wonders you have missed. There were thirty events altogether: talks, chamber ensembles, opera, masterclasses, come-and-sing-Mozart, a showcase for young musicians, Festival Folk, Strings in the Nave… I could go on. Music lovers are strongly urged to turn down the late August page in next year’s diary - and to book early.

Genesis Quartet: Ciara Williams (soprano), Lydia Ward (alto), Michael Burgess (tenor), Ben Rice (bass)

Sonas Quartet: Yvette Lottman (violin), Isabelle Allan (violin), Eve Quigley (viola), Alice Abram (cello)

English Song: Mark Padmore (tenor), Libby Burgess (piano)

Byron in Southwell: Geoffrey Bond

Don Juan: Tama Matheson (director/actor/writer), Clare Hammond (piano)

10th Anniversary Concert: Alison Rose (soprano), Susan Bickley (mezzo), Mark Padmore (tenor), Frederick Long (bass), Festival Voices and Sinfonia, Marcus Farnsworth (conductor)