Christopher Morley previews the classical music season ahead.
As what we laughingly describe as our summer comes to an end, autumn approaches, but still the festival season goes on, with enticing ones at various attractive ends of our region at the beginning of October.
Autumn in Malvern is a long-running festival based in those lovely hills which have inspired artists from the visionary writer William Langland to the great composer Edward Elgar.
Year after year its hard-working founder and artistic director Peter Smith brings together an absorbing programme of events covering music, poetry, talks and art exhibitions, and the forthcoming festival offers some particular delights.
The Poets go to War, a talk by Professor Jon Stallworthy at Colwall Village Hall on Saturday October 1 (3.15pm) sets the scene for the next day’s portrait of the poet and composer Ivor Gurney. “Severn Meadows”, featuring narrator Peter Florence, baritone Marcus Farnsworth and pianist James Bailleu recounts the life of this poor war-battered Gloucesterhire poet and songwriter (Malvern College, October 2, 3pm).
Peter Smith leads a walk around Malvern, In the footsteps of Elgar, at 10am on October 9 (meet at the Elgar statue on Belle Vue Terrace), prior to a talk from one of the great Elgar doyens, Jerrold Northrop Moore, on his Early Adventures in Elgar-land (Coach House Theatre, 3pm).
October 15 regrettably sees me divulging, Confessions of a Music Critic, at the Elgar Birthplace Museum in Broadheath (2.30pm), and a week later Aldwyn Voices and friends present a programme of Music and Literature of the Malvern Hills Countryside in Great Malvern Priory, including the Rhapsody on Bredon Hill for violin and piano by the Stourport-born Julius Harrison (Great Malvern Priory, October 22 3pm).
Next day (October 23) the Aldwyn Voices are at St Leonard’s Church in Newland, singing Compline (7pm), and Autumn in Malvern ends on Saturday October 29 with a mouth-watering programme of Britten, Mendelssohn, Shostakovich and Bruch (a rare hearing of his Octet in B-flat major) at Malvern College (7.30pm).
Away on the other side of our region the Stratford-on-Avon Music Festival is more concentrated, running from October 15 to 22. Its brochure opens with a memorable quotation from Friedrich Nietszche:
“Without music, life would be a mistake” (and who can argue with that?).
There is a huge mix of music in this busy week, through jazz, folk, and world music, and with many classical offerings.
Things kick off on Saturday evening, October 15, with an all-Vivaldi programme played in candlelight by La Serenissima in Holy Trinity Church (7.45pm), before Sunday brings one of our most eminent pianists, Martin Roscoe, to the town for a recital of Beethoven, Debussy and Schumann, as well as the world premiere of Arabesque by Stephen Willey, set as the centrepiece of a cunningly-devised programme delightful in its symmetry (Shakespeare Institute, 8pm).
The first of the festival’s lunchtime concerts is given in the Town Hall by the Barbirolli Quartet, playing Haydn, Beethoven and a new work by Nicholas Stuart – one of the many attractions of this Stratford festival is its cultivation of contemporary music (12 noon).
And the Barbirolli players can be heard later in the day in the first of the festival’s innovative “Buy a Beer” Concerts (admission free, just prop yourself up at the bar of The Chapel, Shakespeare Street, 6pm).
And there is a full-blown contemporary music concert on Monday evening given by the Contemporary Consort (clarinet, cello and piano) in the Shakespeare Institute. Strongly featured in the programme are new works by Joe Cutler, head of composition at Birmingham Conservatoire (7.30pm).
