United Kingdom Midsummer Music Competition 2024: St Mary’s Church, Amersham. 8.6.2024. (CSa)
Live performance 4 – Mark Padmore (tenor), Paul Lewis and Élisabeth Pion (piano), Leon Bosch (double bass), Vertavo Quartet (Øyvor Volle [violin] Annabelle Meare [violin], Berit Cardas [viola], Bjørg Lewis [cello])
Louise Adolpha Le Beau – Piano Quartet in F minor, Op.28
Fauré – La bonne chanson, Op.61
Schubert – Piano Sonata in B flat main, D960
Live performance 5 – Dame Imogen Cooper and Paul Lewis (piano), Leon Bosch (double bass), Vertavo Quartet
Bach arr. Kempff – Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein, BWV.734
Bach arr. Busoni – Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland, BWV.659
Britten – String Quartet No.2 in C main, Op.36
Beethoven arr. Lachner – Piano Concerto No.5 in E-flat main, Op.73
St Mary’s Church stands within the coronary heart of Outdated Amersham, a quintessentially English market city with historic Tudor homes, buckled pubs, and low flintstone partitions, sitting on the finish of the Metropolitan line, on the sting of what the late John Betjeman described as ‘the rising tide of Metroland’. Cushioned within the Chiltern Hills, this peaceable rural hamlet has in some way survived the architectural ravages of twentieth century suburbia. St Mary’s, a good-looking, Norman-towered constructing courting from the twelfth century, is an unlikely but aesthetically and acoustically ultimate location for an annual world-class three-day music competition.
It was based 15 years in the past by the famend live performance pianist Paul Lewis and his cellist spouse Bjørg who lived close by. Every June at round midsummer, they collect round them a small group of artist buddies, to flee the pressures of their busy worldwide schedules and make music collectively in an off-the-cuff, accessible and collegial manner. Supported totally by personal charitable subscriptions, this low-key competition attracts a loyal worldwide following, and performs an vital function within the lifetime of the group, significantly for the youngsters of the native main faculty who can entry concert events at little or no price. Though chamber works by Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert characterize the core of Lewis’s repertoire and have giant within the programmes of the competition, they don’t dominate. Because the final two concert events of this yr’s season amply demonstrated, the selection of music is extensive and private. In Lewis’s phrases it’s summoned ‘from the guts’ of the gamers.
Saturday afternoon’s recital started with the not often heard Piano Quartet in F minor by Louise Adolpha Le Beau, a pupil of Clara Schumann. Taking part in from a small platform wedged between St Mary’s nave and elaborately monumented chancel, three members of the illustrious Vertavo Quartet, joined by nimble-fingered pianist Élizabeth Pion instantly transported us into the golden, richly autumnal soundworld paying homage to Brahms. After the grave and impassioned strains of the opening Adagio got here a genuinely fiery Allegro con fuoco, its enthralling melodies and propulsive tempos compellingly performed. A gorgeously burnished second motion Adagio gave technique to a sprightly Mazurka resolving into an infectiously playful Finale.
In a dramatic shift, from absolutely bloomed late German Romanticism to sensuous French proto-Impressionism, English tenor Mark Padmore, joined by the Vertavo Quartet, Leon Bosch’s double bass and Pion on the piano, carried out a chamber orchestrated model of Fauré’s wistful track cycle, La bonne chanson. This musical setting of 9 poems by Verlaine tells the story of a collection of doomed amorous affairs. It was initially written for voice and piano alone, however Fauré later created this extra luxurious model. ‘The younger musicians are nearly unanimous in disliking La bonne chanson, however I don’t care. I like it’ declared Marcel Proust. On listening to this efficiency, few would have discovered trigger to disagree with him. Craving harmonies performed with melodic grace, the strings and piano tapped the essence of the music’s ardour, whereas Padmore, in an account of emotional richness and intelligence, subtly formed every phrase and enunciated every line with crystal readability. In poems reminiscent of La lune blanche, Padmore evoked an nearly spectral high quality with music which conjured floral fragrances and twilight, whereas within the closing piece, L’hiver a cessé, he communicated the ecstasy of affection with urgency and pleasure.
Extra musical poetry adopted the interval when Paul Lewis, in a efficiency infused with tenderness, performed Schubert’s longest piano work, the Sonata in B-flat main, D960, written within the final yr of his life. Musicologists debate whether or not Schubert knew on the time that he was dying. In Lewis’s masterful and finely structured efficiency, the query remained unanswered. The opening Molto moderato was performed with the simplicity and innocence of a cradle track till that premonitory menacing closing trill. A deeply meditative Andante sostenuto was relieved by an infectiously rhythmic Scherzo and all traces of earlier agitation have been erased in an ecstatic closing Allegro.
Though there have been no apparent themes to the night programme, the three chosen works have been linked by a typical thread. Every was tailored and organized by others. Opening the live performance with two keyboard items, the incomparable Dame Imogen Cooper performed Bach’s chorale prelude Nun freut euch, lieben Christen g’mein organized for the piano by Wilhelm Kempff, and the cantata Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland in a remodeling by Ferruccio Busoni. Calmly executed, her account was directly magisterial and religious, and offered an ideal second for tranquil reflection earlier than the return of the Vertavo Quartet and an emotionally charged efficiency of Britten’s String Quartet No.2 in C main. Britten was impressed by Purcell’s vocal writing and the work was composed in 1945 shortly after he and violinist Yehudi Menuhin had returned from a tour of Germany. There that they had performed for focus camp survivors, and Britten displays this expertise in a darkish, desolate and typically brutal soundscape. The gamers pinpointed the music’s elusive pulse within the expansive first motion Allegro and navigated the jerking, turbulent Vivace at full tilt. In a gripping efficiency of the ultimate motion – a 17-minute Chacony sostenuto – they captured in a collection of slowly swelling and increasing passages the deep disappointment that runs by means of Britten’s unsettling composition.
Optimism and triumph have been duly restored within the second half with a life-affirming efficiency of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.5 tailored in 1881 by Vinzenz Lachner for piano and string quintet. One suspects that the selection of this work to finish the festivities was not totally unconnected with the choice to play Le Beau’s Piano Quartet earlier within the day, for the reason that younger Louise Adolpha made her debut with Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ and her composition trainer occurred to be Franz Lachner, Vinzenz’s brother.
Chamber performances of the Beethoven piano concertos have been commonplace within the nineteenth century drawing rooms of novice musicians and are right this moment regaining their reputation on the live performance platform. Intricate decorative particulars in any other case misplaced in ‘massive band’ renditions make up for the absence of orchestral heft. On this event, the Vertavos have been joined by double bassist Leon Bosch and Paul Lewis in a merely magical partnership. Save for some unequal conversations between strings and piano throughout the heroic opening Allegro through which the keyboard appeared to get the higher hand, instrumental steadiness was maintained, and purity of tone shone by means of. Lewis, an undemonstrative maestro, gave a deeply meditative account of the hymn-like Andante, providing a brief interval of contemplation earlier than the Rondo and the rhythmically ungainly closing Allegro erupted in an irrepressible dance.
After a number of beneficiant phrases of thanks and reward from the modest Lewis to mark the top of this yr’s competition, viewers and gamers, unhappy but elated, gathered in St Mary’s timeless churchyard, mulling over their musical feast and basking within the final unsure rays of midsummer solar. It was a fittingly understated technique to conclude three days of matchless music making on the finish of the Metropolitan line.
Chris Sallon
