Sixteen world premieres and two Welsh premieres, performed in the space of five days by a string chamber orchestra, a choir and several instrumental soloists – that’s quite an undertaking, but it’s par for the course for Presteigne Festival. Contemporary music is deep in the DNA of the event, which every year brings a group of performers together in the small Welsh border town for an immersive few days in which pieces from the classical canon provide occasional punctuation marks in programmes that celebrate the work of living composers.
Some of this year’s premieres were miniatures, such as the two delightful “Landscapes” for solo harp by the festival’s president, Michael Berkeley, who lives a few miles as the crow flies from Bleddfa Church. There Sally Pryce, principal harp of the Aurora Orchestra and Sinfonia of London, performed On Returning to the Welsh Hills, expressing the composer’s constant delight at coming home after time away, and Spring Tide at Morston, a recollection of boyhood sailing holidays in Norfolk. In the same concert Pryce and violinist Fenella Humphreys (pictured below) premiered Narcissus and Echo by Tayla-Leigh Payne (b.1999), one of the youngest of the commissioned composers This was an exquisitely beautiful evocation of the myth, one of the most effective pieces of the weekend.
Presteigne’s format doesn’t generally include performers chatting to the audience but Humphreys did take a moment to say that she and Pryce were schoolfriends and sometimes shared treble solos in works such as Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, but this was the first time they had ever performed together as professional instrumentalists. She added thanks to the festival’s artistic director and conductor George Vass for brokering this reunion and more generally for bringing musicians together in both familiar and unfamiliar combinations.
Five of the premieres were supported by the George Vass Commission Fund (GVCF), set up nine years ago. They included another of the weekend’s stand-out pieces, Erlid by Cameron Biles-Liddell, premiered on the Saturday night by the Presteigne Festival Orchestra and its oboist Katie Bennington, deftly representing the character of the servant boy Gwion, on the run from the sorceress Ceridwen, menacingly represented by the orchestral strings.
Composer in Residence for the festival was Michael Zev Gordon, Professor of Composition at the University of Birmingham. His music is more astringent than that of the other composers favoured at Presteigne – it was slightly surprising, for example, to be presented with the vocal (for tenor soloist James Gilchrist) and intellectual challenges of his setting of Ten Propositions of Barich Spinoza at two o’clock on the Sunday afternoon. But Gilchrist and pianist Jâms Coleman sold the work with total commitment, and the opportunity to hear several pieces from Zev Gordon’s back catalogue in addition to two premieres was very welcome.
One of those back catalogue pieces, Barcarola for violin, horn and piano from 1989, opened what was for me the stand-out concert of the weekend, Friday evening’s “A Trio of Horn Trios”, featuring Presteigne regulars Fenella Humphreys and pianist Clare Hammond, with horn soloist Ben Goldscheider (pictured above with Hammond) , making his first visit to the festival. Goldscheider and Hammond premiered a wonderful piece by Zev Gordon, Waldeinsamkeit, inspired by the composer’s regular walks in Queen’s Wood, near his North London home, with the horn vividly evoking the sound of the breeze in the trees. The warmth and subtlety of Goldscheider’s sound, his control of overtones and resonances, and the precision of his tuning in fast passages distinguished the trio’s performances of a single-movement work by Huw Watkins, originally written for the Nash Ensemble, in which a bass-heavy, dissonant piano part alternates with more lyrical exchanges between the violin and horn, and a more extended three-movement work from 1952 by Lennox Berkeley.
Another substantial Zev Gordon piece was included in the Saturday evening concert: The Gleam of Hidden Skies, commissioned by Cheltenham Festival in 2013 and written for the same forces as Britten’s Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. Where the horn in the Britten has a fragile persona in contrast to the singer’s more secure musical line, in this dramatic sequence, setting texts by Byron, Larkin, Blake, Rosenberg and Cummings, it seemed to me that the roles were reversed, with the horn totally in command through every twist and turn and change of mood.
James Gilchrist seemed uncomfortable in The Gleam of Hidden Skies but really came into his own in the second half of his Sunday recital with Coleman. His performances of the second set of Five Songs of W H Davies by Adrian Williams, a co-founder of Presteigne Festival, were full of character and drama, from the simple delicacy of “Little Flower” and the two unaccompanied verses of the concluding song, “In Silent Groves”, to the hysterical, frustrated rage of “The Sailor to his Parrot” – sung to an actual stuffed parrot perched on a microphone stand, which brought the house down. He concluded his recital with Britten’s Winter Words, a superb performance in which every note and every syllable was sung with the deepest understanding and intention.
Works by Williams popped up throughout the weekend, marking his 70th birthday year. They included his Concerto for String Orchestra, a co-commission by the Amsterdam Sinfonietta and Presteigne Festival from 2019; the original brief was for a piece with an overall sunny disposition, and it certainly dispelled the damp gloom that had settled on the Welsh Marches on the night of this performance. His spacious and reflective Soliloquy for solo piano was included in a magisterial recital by Clare Hammond, which also featured Three Études by Emma-Ruth Richards, the latter two newly commissioned by the festival and the Wigmore Hall to follow a first movement commissioned by the Luxembourg Philharmonie. The études were inspired by flight patterns of birds and the work recording them of Spanish photographer Xavi Bou, and the first, “Escape” certainly succeeds in evoking starling murmurations; “Bounding” and “Apodidae” were less successful in representing finches and swifts respectively.
The work of once-neglected women composers from the past was an important festival theme, and Hammond’s recital took its title “Femme de Légende”, from the three women depicted in the charming suite of that name by Mél Bonis (1858-1937): Desdemona, Phoebé and Melisande. But it was Hammond’s fiery performance of the demanding Sonatina (surely misnamed, given its scale) by Doreen Carwithen (1922-2003) that deservedly drew the most enthusiastic applause of the afternoon. Grace Williams, Henriette Bosmans, Gražyna Bacewicz, Dorothy Howell and Lili Boulanger were among composers whose works were included in this strand, together with Imogen Holst (1907-1984) whose wonderful suite for solo cello The Fall of the Leaf was given an extremely fine performance by Rainer Crosett in a superb recital on the first afternoon. It included another of the stand-out premieres, I need stillness by Natalie Roe (b.1999), a co-commission with the Royal Philharmonic Society. It is not easy to create a piece for solo cello that sounds completely original, but Roe has done it with this depiction of the busy madness of contemporary life suddenly being stilled.
She also successfully achieved the difficult task of following Gala Water by Sally Beamish, a deeply moving work that was premiered in 1994 by the composer’s then husband, cellist Robert Irvine, and expresses their shared grief at the loss of a child through miscarriage. Beamish had celebrated her 70th birthday the previous day, and she too had several works performed to mark the occasion.
Rainer Crosett (pictured above) is the cellist of the Amsterdam-based HearAndNow Collective, who were making their first visit to Presteigne as a quartet (pictured below), although violinists Laura Rickard and Emma Roijackers, who alternated in the leader’s chair, have frequently performed at the festival as a duo or in the orchestra. They are bound to be back, as their three concerts were enthusiastically received. The second, at Bleddfa church, opened with Bacewicz’s Third String Quartet and closed with Beethoven’s Op. 18 No 1, both magnificently performed and sandwiching an excellent new Quartet in E by Herefordshire-born Robert Peate (b.1987). Entitled “Grasses”, it was inspired by the paintings of the Charles MacCarthy, the father of one of the composer’s schoolfriends, representing details from the fields and hedgerows he passed on his daily walks with his dog around Kingsland, not far from Presteigne. The paintings had been brought out of storage and hung in the Hall Barn, next to Bleddfa church, for the duration of the festival.
The collective’s third concert in St Andrew’s Church, Presteigne, the festival’s primary location, featured a stunning, revelatory performance of the Ravel Quartet and a brilliantly imaginative “Movement for String Quartet” by Mathilde Wantenaar (b.1993), this year’s “Featured Composer”, a graduate of conservatories in both Amsterdam and The Hague, and a welcome new compositional voice. The closing concert included her ambitious Rhapsody for Piano and Strings, splendidly performed by Jâms Coleman and packed with ideas that would require a second or third hearing to appreciate fully.
Wantenaar was one of five women invited by the festival to compose short responses to Prokofiev’s Five Melodies in their version for violin and piano. As they explained in conversation with Thomas Hyde, Wantenaar, Electra Perivolaris, Claire Victoria Roberts, Lynne Plowman and Cheryl Frances-Hoad worked without consulting one another at all and in some cases without consulting the performers, Humphreys and Coleman; but the result of this musical game of Consequences was a surprisingly satisfying suite.
I’ve already exceeded my word count but it would be wrong not to mention the performance of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale on the first night, adroitly semi-staged by Ruth Evans, and magnificently played by the Presteigne Festival Ensemble conducted by George Vass, with lively performances by Alexander Knox as the Soldier, Alex Wilson as the Devil and Jonathan Gunthorpe as the Narrator. Lillie Harris’s song cycle The aspens talk of rain, premiered in the same concert, is very beautiful but seemed to lie a little low for soprano Rowan Pierce, who was more at ease in the haunting solo movements of Grace Williams’s suite The Dancers and Cecilia McDowall’s The Bird of Time. These pieces also featured the upper voices of the Choir of King’s College, London, in residence for the weekend, with Patrick Allies deputising for their director, Joseph Fort, who is on paternity leave.
The singers made an excellent impression with their performances of Cecilia McDowall’s Missa Mariae and motets by Judith Weir and Kristina Arekelyan at the Festival Eucharist in St Andrew’s, then travelled to Leominster Priory for their showcase concert, the highlights of which were the premiere of a festival commission by Daniel Soley, Kintsugi (You Will Get Through Today), setting words on the theme of motherhood by Erica Hesketh, whom he met when they were part of different artist development programmes at London’s Southbank Centre; and Olivia Sparkhall’s cleverly crafted Lux aeterna, a reflection on the near-death experiences of Julian of Norwich.
