Classic line-up for a classic Lichfield Festival
Jul 8 2010 By Christopher Morley
Christopher Morley picks some of the classical highlights of the Lichfield Festival.
The former Poet Laureate, Sir Andrew Motion joins forces with one of the country’s brightest young musical stars for the launch of the Lichfield Festival on Thursday at Lichfield Cathedral.
Violinist Nicola Benedetti, BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2004, and winner of the Classical Brit Award in 2008 is soloist in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons with the European Union Chamber Orchestra, and Sir Andrew will read four sonnets he has composed complementing each one.
On Friday the popular composer of film and television music, Carl Davis, conducts the oldest professional symphony orchestra in the country, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, in a programme marking the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain.
Plenty of Vera Lynn classics will be sung by former “Forces Sweetheart” Claire Sweeney, and there is a generous sprinkling of wartime film scores to relish in this programme at Lichfield Cathedral.
But also on Friday, over at the comfortable Lichfield Garrick, vocalist Claire Martin and Sir Richard Rodney Bennett deliver “The Best is Yet to Come”, promised to be a “very sophisticated evening of jazz cabaret”.
Sir Richard, once regarded as one of the most gritty enfant terrible avant-garde composers, has mellowed into a composer/pianist of great warmth of personality, often playing (and singing to his own accompaniment) at London’s Pizza in the Park restaurant, as well as still producing compositions of great quality. Among his previous duo-partners was the unforgettable Marian Montgomery.
Evelyn Glennie returns to Lichfield Cathedral on Saturday after an absence of 16 years, when she performs a huge range of percussion music, including Rzewski’s To the Earth, scored for a set of four flowerpots.
Wednesday brings Lichfield Cathedral a wonderful programme of string-orchestra music from the Russian Chamber Philharmonic, conducted by Juri Gilbo, and with Michel Gershwin (estimable name) as the violin soloist.
There are so many goodies in this line-up: Grieg’s enchanting Holberg Suite, Mozart’s rigorous C minor Adagio and Fugue, Tchaikovsky’s classy, elegant Serenade for Strings. And Gershwin is soloist in Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style (I defy anyone not to be bowled over by the finale’s heart-searching melody as it climbs into the heavens), and Bach’s invigorating E major Violin Concerto.
The following evening in the Cathedral VOCES8 joins with the Lichfield Festival Chorus in a programme of classic songs from the American Song Book. Founded as recently as 2003 by ex-choristers of Westminster Abbey, this a cappella octet first achieved international success in 2005, when it won first prize at the International Choral Grand Prix in Gorizia, Italy, and its repertoire ranges from early polyphony, through jazz, to pop arrangements.
Choral music on a grander scale resounds in the Cathedral next Friday, when the internationally-renowned Ex Cathedra returns to its original Lichfield roots with the kind of programme which has marked out director Jeffrey Skidmore’s imaginative and questing approach ever since the chamber chorus’ foundation 40 years ago.
“In Search of 1610” juxtaposes Monteverdi’s secular madrigals with the spiritual settings he later made of them, and the evening is completed with the composer’s Missa in illo Tempore and his splendid Magnificat a 6.
Later that evening harpist Catrin Finch brings her much-acclaimed performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations to the Cathedral Presbytery. Finch’s Deutsche Grammophon recording of this magnificent work, originally composed for one of Bach’s pupils to play on the harpsichord to lull an insomniac employer, went instantly to number one in the UK classical charts.
Still very young, Catrin Finch has a glittering biography. After garnering a plethora of awards during her studies she was appointed Royal Harpist to the Prince of Wales between the years 2000 and 2004, the first time the position had been revived since 1873.
Since then she has played worldwide, including a tour alongside the great Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel – who, if you’re lucky, you can catch singing the massive part of Hans Sachs in Welsh National Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger at Birmingham Hippodrome on Saturday.
The Lichfield Festival ends next Saturday with a visit from the BBC Philharmonic. Vassily Sinaisky, who will be a big presence with the CBSO at Symphony Hall in the early autumn as part of their huge Mahler overview, is joined by another BBC Young Musician winner, Guy Johnston, in the Schumann Cello Concerto.
The Cathedral programme is completed with Samuel Barber’s School for Scandal Overture and Tchaikovsky’s Pathetique Symphony.
* Full details of festival events at www.lichfieldfestival.org
