STUART MILLSON enjoys a rhapsodic favourite as well as world premieres at the English Music Festival
Friday 23 May 2025 marked the beginning of the eighteenth English Music Festival, a much-looked-forward-to annual event in the classical calendar and a testimony to the considerable organisational and fundraising skills of its founding director, Mrs. Em Marshall-Luck. Despite receiving no support from the Arts Council of England, no help from the ‘Department of Culture, Media and Sport’ and no visit or encouragement from Government ministers (either Labour or Conservative – save for one brief appearance by Boris Johnson in the early days), the Festival has managed to galvanise a loyal following of supporters, benefactors and artists – thus ensuring the continuation, not just of the main four-day event, but a host of other concerts, events and recording initiatives. A lesson in self-reliance and self-belief, the EMF must be considered as one of the most remarkable events of its kind – not least because of its presentation of a forgotten part of our national musical heritage.
Usually when one thinks of an English music concert, works such as Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’ or Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending come to mind, and many such prominent works are indeed to be found in the Festival’s programmes. But what distinguishes the EMF is its patient work – hours spent in archives and in tracking down lost scores – reconstructing a lost world of English music. Thanks to the musicological detective work of figures such as Martin Yates, the conductor of the opening-night’s concert, audiences are taken way beyond the usual boundaries.
This year, we were treated to the enigma and variations of Stanley Bate’s Second Symphony – Bate, a pupil of Vaughan Williams and the German composer, Hindemith, yet who has been practically forgotten by the musical establishment in this country. The presentation of his searing four-movement symphony from the late 1930s amounted to a posthumous world-premiere for a potentially great but tortured figure, who died tragically before his time. It also brought home to the audience (and performers) just how avant-garde English composers could be – resetting our idea of our native music, as something that could be as Shostakovichian as pastoral or romantic.
Bate’s work had some radiant moments within its taut structure, like an exhalation of breath amid the angst, but on the whole, some of the febrile nature (and phraseology) reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony made it a muscular, physical, challenging – even shattering – musical experience. The beginning of the last movement brought to mind the stretched tonality and astringent string writing of Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, making the piece very much the province (you would have thought) of BBC Symphony Orchestra repertoire, those specialists of 20th century music. But I doubt that any ensemble could have rivalled the faultless, totally-committed rendition given at Dorchester by the BBC Concert Orchestra – musicians who seem to have the gift of versatility, allowing them to roam from show music to popular classics, and the pinnacles of British music of the last century.
Alongside the Stanley Bate, the BBC CO gave us an injection of springtime energy, in the form of William Alwyn’s The Innumerable Dance – An English Overture. This was a vision of sensuality and radiance, every bit as transcendental as a Wagnerian Tristan and Isolde. It was followed by Delius’s well-known The Walk to the Paradise Garden, although the setting is Switzerland rather than our own land. The rich, expansive acoustic of Dorchester Abbey, full of reverberation and ‘air’ was just right for the Delius, as it was indeed for the Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue, an early work (1901) by Vaughan Williams, the monumental conclusion of which included the magisterial tones of the Abbey’s organ, ringing out over and through the orchestra.
The Festival paid tribute to Sir Arthur Bliss, in this the 50th anniversary year of his death, with another exceptional interpretation, the Cello Concerto of 1970, a piece premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival under the baton of Benjamin Britten. Originally written for the Russian cellist Rostropovich, the Dorchester performance was given by one of the greats of our own era, Raphael Wallfisch, who brought this neglected, fine and fluent score to life. Having performed Finzi’s Cello Concerto at the Festival some ten years ago, Wallfisch has the full measure of English music – bringing a warmth, detail, spirit and true authority to another part of England’s music that has tended to languish in a backwater. Sitting as I was on the second row, I found myself admiring the chamber-like detail of the cello playing, the soloist given a full spotlight of sound, thanks to the sensitive accompaniment of Martin Yates and the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Image: Stuart Millson
The next day at the Festival’s Saturday morning recital, the official chamber players took centre-stage – violinist, Rupert Marshall-Luck and pianist, Peter Cartwright, a powerful partnership dedicated (again) to works and composers who have become distant to us. First was Norman O’Neill’s (1875-1934) Suite in B minor for Violin and Piano, and then Alan Rawsthorne’ s 1933-34 Violin Sonata. Rawsthorne attained fame as a film composer in the 1940s and ‘50s, but his Violin Sonata is little known. In fact, the recitalists were giving the first public performance of the work in the United Kingdom. Both violinist and pianist were as skilled in delivering the foot-tapping finale to the Rawsthorne, as they were in the gentler, dreamier lines of Delius’s Sonata in B major and the Cradle Song by Herbert Howells (the latter, another premiere, thanks to the determination of the EMF) – confirming them as two of our country’s very finest performers and advocates of English chamber music.
STUART MILLSON is a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, and a Contributing Editor to The Brazen Head
