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  1. Culture
15 July 2010

Take that, Classic FM!

The Cheltenham Music Festival is an unlikely setting for artistic rebellion.

By Alexandra Coghlan

There is nothing in the stolidly Edwardian marble and pastel shades of Cheltenham’s Town Hall that speaks of rebellion. The town itself — originally a spa for well-heeled Regency gentry — is all Cotswold stone and laboriously tasteful bistros, and the annual Music Festival an unimpeachable mixture of local talent and international superstars.

Yet it was here last week that a young Russian violinist flouted the rules and blew the doors off that most hackneyed of classical favourites, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Giving Londoners an unarguable reason to brave the trek to the West Country, the line-up for this year’s Cheltenham Music Festival includes performances from Freddy Kempf, Sarah Connolly and Steven Isserlis. Last Tuesday, however, it was Alina Ibragimova, the Russian violinist who performed at Yehudi Menhuin’s funeral at the age of just 14, who took to the platform with the European Union Chamber Orchestra to perform an unusual programme of Vivaldi and Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence.

Framed by readings of a new set of sonnets by Andrew Motion, it seemed possible, for the first time since Nigel Kennedy’s now ubiquitously anarchic rendering, that Vivaldi’s concerto might be startled out of its cotton-padded Classic FM coma and back into life.

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The images of Motion’s poetry, a series of meditations on the passing of time, nature and love that owed much to Eliot’s Four Quartets, were most delicately precise in their rendering of the natural landscape — the frost that “slips a filigree sleeve along the still-bare Mulberry arms” — focusing and newly reanimating Vivaldi’s own musical sketchings.

Taking her place among the orchestra rather than out in front, Ibragimova signalled her understanding of the peculiarly intimate relationship necessary between solo and orchestral forces here. Opening with the impossibly fragile bird calls of “Spring”, hers was an interpretation of calculated extremes, following the colourfully programmatic contours of the music with reckless commitment.

Moments of extroverted dynamism — the chromatic third-movement storm music of “Summer”, the opening of “Autumn” — and the starkly transparent, introspective textures of the largo in “Spring” or the allegro of “Winter” were dramatically juxtaposed, Ibragimova trusting in the solidly familiar structure of the work to absorb the shock of her lyrical shiftings of dynamic and tempo.

Sacrificing polish for a febrile urgency (sadly not always matched by the rather polite forces of EUCO, who only came into their own in the Tchaikovsky), the result was both authentic in content and bluntly contemporary in delivery, with an immediacy in the solo passages of almost improvisatory fluidity.

Despite the odd flaw of intonation or tone, moments where her technique was not quite the equal of her expressive intent, Ibragimova delivered a performance so fragile, so intelligently modern, that one half expected the great marble pillars of the hall to topple from iconoclastic shock.

More traditional, though perhaps no less provocative, was Thursday night’s festival concert at Tewkesbury Abbey. Celebrating its 400th anniversary this year, Monteverdi’s Vespers is one of the most notorious sources of artistic contention, provoking the musicologist Denis Arnold to conclude that, “to perform it is to court disaster”.

Little is known of its true composition date, original performance context, or even its pitch, but most vexed has been the question of vocal forces. More typically performed by a massed choir and soloists, there is a case to be made for using just solo voices — a case given persuasive life in Thursday’s performance by Peter Harvey, the Magdalena Consort and ten vocal soloists.

Scored with only two treble lines, the distinctive texture of the work is dominated by its eight lower voice parts. In the resonant acoustic space of Tewkesbury Abbey, the impact was both clear and gloriously powerful, with Harvey (who contributed a baritone part as well as directing) able to balance the collective force of the men and orchestra against the lighter sopranos of Elin Manahan Thomas and Julia Doyle.

In doing away with a full choir, Harvey and his performers did lose a central source of dramatic contrast, sometimes failing to compensate sufficiently with dynamics, which tended to default to a full-toned mf — not aided by some occasionally rather brash orchestral playing. Texturally, however, the single voices of the ensemble yielded an unusual clarity and flexibility, with the intricate decorative detail of the vocal ornamentation emerging clearly silhouetted against the collective texture.

With soloists of this quality — James Gilchrist, Charles Daniels, Eamonn Dougan, Robert Macdonald — vocal excellence was a given, and most striking was the trust and communication on display between the performers in this highly ornamental and delicately spun music. Two high points were the duets “Pulchra es” and “Duo Seraphim”. The latter, an evocative description of two angels calling to each other, became, in the voices of Gilchrist and Daniels, an impossibly fluid battle of skills, the two diving and dovetailing among one another with ecstatic urgency.

Sacred and secular, national and international: this year’s Cheltenham Music Festival represents a stylish challenge to our disproportionately London-centred classical scene. With the coming weeks bringing major music festivals to Edinburgh, York, Gloucester and Dartington, the bar has been set high indeed.

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