There’s no denying that the Cheltenham Music Festival has hit a few bumps on the road in the past few years. But it has survived to reach its 80th birthday. And although much slimmed down since the postwar era when a new British symphony was premiered almost every year (mostly never to be heard again) there’s plenty of quality and ambition on show this week, culminating on Saturday in a recreation of that first concert in 1945.
I caught the festival’s opening two concerts, both in the Regency elegance of the Pittville Pump Room. The Britten Sinfonia, led by the excellent Zoe Beyers, at least kept alive the Cheltenham tradition of commissioning new music by premiering Deborah Pritchard’s Time Colour. But this was no symphonic effort. Written for eight strings to celebrate the festival’s 80th birthday it was all over in about six minutes. Pity, because I was enjoying how it dipped into the stylistic world of 20th-century English string masterpieces, from Vaughan Williams and Butterworth to Tippett, while still sounding fresh and imaginative.
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Two chamber masterpieces followed: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet with Joy Farrell mellow and assured on the solo instrument; and Mendelssohn’s String Octet. At first I thought the wit and vivacity of that teenage miracle would be slightly blunted by the Pump Room’s lush acoustics. But maybe the players sensed the danger because by the time we reached the scintillating scherzo and finale the energy level was running at about 200 per cent and the music simply took off.
Pavel Kolesnikov’s recital had but one masterpiece — Bach’s Goldberg Variations. But at the end I felt we had travelled through worlds of emotion and profundity. The way Kolesnikov pointed up the inner counterpoint without making a fetish of it; the subtle tonal contrasts he found between variations; the ghostly touch he brought to the enigmatic chromaticism of the minor-key variation; and the way he built the final Quodlibet to a joyous climax then whittled it down to silence as if disappearing over the horizon — all that proclaimed a musician of rare insight at work.
Indeed I doubt whether the piece has been more enthrallingly played since 1955, which (as all Goldberg connoisseurs will know) is when Glenn Gould made his classic recording.
★★★★☆
Festival continues to Jul 12, cheltenhamfestivals.org
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