Posted on by Stuart Millson

From ‘Glorious Devon’ to Orthodox Estonia

Dartington Hall. Image: Wikimedia Commons
STUART MILLSON reports from the English Music Festival – and reviews new issues of Shostakovich, Arvo Pärt and Rimsky-Korsakov

With funding for the serious, civilised arts in short supply in modern Britain (no Arts Council of Wales money for Mid-Wales Opera; the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, de-funded by Birmingham City Council) the English Music Festival – EMF – is an inspiration and hope in the face of general adversity. As one of the Festival’s regular conductors, Hilary Davan Wetton, pointed out, if this were France, the government there would be pouring hundreds of thousands of Euros into a French music festival – a contrast to our own political elite, with their freebies for Britney Spears gigs and obsessions with ‘diversity’. The nineteenth English Music gathering took place, escaping this year to that utopian, rural setting of Dartington Hall in Devon – a magnificent structure built by the first Duke of Exeter in the 14th century, and turned into a prototype agrarian and arts community in the 1920s by monied visionaries, Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst. A College of Arts flourished here between 1961 and 2010, and traces of the Elmhirsts’ William Morris-type outlook still survive in this idyll of garden and performance spaces.

EMF Founder-Director, Em Marshall-Luck, welcomed for her late May Spring bank holiday extravaganza artists of the calibre of the London Mozart Players, the University of Exeter Chapel Choir and numerous soloists and chamber musicians, all performing in the impressive and resonant Dartington Great Hall.

The University of Exeter Chapel Choir. Image: Stuart Millson

Saturday the 23rd May was a day of brilliant sunshine and intense heat, so Festivalgoers enjoyed the coolness of the old mediaeval building, filled as it was by the ethereal tones of the Exeter choristers in works from the 1920s and ‘30s – Vaughan Williams’s, Lord, Thou Hast Been Our Refuge (the choir used to grand antiphonal effect); Holst’s meditative The Evening Watch; Edgar Bainton’s To Thy Name Above Every Name (a testing work for the singers, and one which, perhaps, should have been conceived with orchestral accompaniment); and Dyson’s Lauds, from Three Songs of Praise. The concert ended with a dip back into the late 19th century, with Elgar’s whimsical choral postcards from old Germany – his Songs from the Bavarian Highlands, the sort of good tunes which you could almost sway along to with a brimming Stein. Elgar and his wife, Alice, clearly relished the countryside of Garmisch, and were inspired by lines such as “Quaff the bright brown ale my treasure, Hark! What joyous sounds!”

The next day, a complete change of mood, with the morning chamber recital – given by violinist, Rupert Marshall-Luck and South African pianist, Peter Cartwright – devoted to music by Bliss, Rawsthorne, Holst, Delius and Howells. Lancashire-born composer, Alan Rawsthorne, is probably best known for his film scores (including that for The Cruel Sea) and his Second Piano Concerto with its carnival-like final movement, but Rupert and Peter have rediscovered for us and curated the composer’s extensive works for violin and piano, giving at this festival the UK premiere of his Theme and Variations for Pianoforte and Violin.

Rawsthorne’s taut, concentrated, challenging writing proved to be an excellent foil to the more romantic sonata, from 1914, by Arthur Bliss – an early work, yet one which any listener, new to the piece, would consider a work of mastery and maturity. With its lovely whirlpool moments, its combination of sunlight, melancholy, nostalgia, the sonata was (for me) the outstanding work of the concert, especially the heartachingly beautiful piano opening, played with such gently paced and slow shaping by Peter Cartwright. Rupert Marshall-Luck more than embraced all the virtuoso moments of the piece, especially the exciting passage where the soloist has every opportunity to out-soar even Vaughan Williams’s famous ascending lark.

Now to recorded music: a new CDs from Chandos Records, of Shostakovich’s great Stalinist era monolith (yet with the composer confusing the totalitarians of his country with cryptic ideas and sardonic snarls) – his Symphony No. 5. Played with great tension and power by the Greater Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic – the old ‘BBC Northern Symphony Orchestra’ to we old Radio 3-ites – the recording dazzles at all levels, the players giving everything they have for the Finnish maestro, John Storgårds, a musician renowned for his readings of Sibelius and Nielsen. Here in the Shostakovich is a darkness that any Scandinavian or Russian would recognise, yet we are in the world, not of the Russian steppes or the cold Baltic coast, but the labyrinths of Moscow and the artist, enslaved but never truly at bay. For those who know their Shostakovich recordings, the new version is extraordinarily similar in temper and timbre to the early-1980s interpretation by that Russian patriot-dissident, cellist-turned-conductor, the great Rostropovich. Some may still remember the pent-up power and bare bones of the Fifth, as performed some 45 years ago by the USA Washington National Symphony Orchestra under that magisterial maestro.

Another famous conductor was Sir Thomas Beecham, founder of both the London and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. Beecham had a wide repertoire, and it is perhaps hard to pin him down: Wagner and Berlioz, and the lush, heavy tone-poems of Richard Strauss appealed to Sir Thomas; Delius, too, and Handel – and opera. But so did orchestral favourites, French ‘lollipops’, and Russian romanticism. New from Siva Oke and SOMM comes a full-blooded, orientally-shimmering account, recorded at a packed Royal Festival Hall in 1957 of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade – an irreplaceable capturing of a style of playing which we often do not hear today; in which the orchestra heaves with turbulence and colour, and section leaders play like virtuoso soloists. Rimsky-Korsakov’s piece is a work steeped in the legends of an imagined Arabian world of magic – of a clever princess who outwits a despotic ruler, by beguiling him with stories which she tells, night after night. (One could almost see Shostakovich in a similar dilemma, using his musical powers to keep one step ahead of the hammer of doom.)

Arvo Part. Image: Woesinger, Wikimedia Commons

Finally, a return to Chandos Records and their new CD of Estonian musical magus, Arvo Pärt (born 1935) – the complete symphonies (1-4), performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra under Eva Ollikainen. “Worlds ahead for clarity” was a one-time sales slogan of Chandos, a choice of words which fully applies to this living-presence, revelation-of-detail recording made a year ago in Reykjavik; a presentation of a symphonic progression from the 1963 ‘Polyphonic’ – just over a quarter-of-an-hour in length, to the harp, timpani and percussion of the 2007-08 Fourth Symphony, subtitled Los Angeles – and dedicated to the Philharmonic Orchestra of that city. Essentially, Pärt’s music is concerned with the spiritual, with pure belief – orthodoxy, credo (‘Credo’ was a name of one piece from the late 1960s). In this collection, it is possible to find a rooted hope for music and for our world – every bit as reassuring as the mediaeval stonework and arches that we found earlier at Dartington Hall.

Recording details: Alan Rawsthorne, the complete works for violin and piano, and the Violin Sonata by Sir Arthur Bliss, available from EM Records, via em.marshall-luck@em-records.com; Shostakovich, Symphony No. 5 (with Second Symphony), CHSA 5378; Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade, RPO, Beecham, SOMM-Beecham 34; Pärt, Complete Symphonies, CHSA 5372

Posted on by Stuart Millson · 1 Comment

From searing symphony to Paradise Garden

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.

Stanley Bate

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.

William Alwyn

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.

Rupert Marshall-Luck and Peter Cartwright
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.

Posted on by Richard Dove

Bliss in the rain

RICHARD DOVE is warmed on a wet day

A rain-soaked, windy, grey Sunday afternoon on the Deal seafront and around 50 valiant, anorak-wrapped hardy souls are in deckchairs facing the Royal Marines tribute (after the 1989 Deal Bombing, in which 11 Royal Marines died) bandstand listening to the Sandwich Concert Brass Band. Can there be a more enduring English scene? As I stand and observe, I wonder if any other genre of music could attract these people to this place, given the atrocious weather.

Brass bands have warmth, whiffs of nostalgia and an enduring empathy with audiences. We are not in awe of their virtuosity. A brass band is the friendly, helpful neighbour who always has that drill bit or lawn spiker to loan you.

Sir Arthur Bliss came to mind as I sheltered and listened. He adored brass bands and was often astounded by their virtuosity: “Hearing the sound these players can produce, it did not take much to persuade me to write Kenilworth.”

The previous few days I had been listening to a new Chandos CD, Bliss: Works for Brass Band, performed by the Black Dyke Band and conducted by that musical polymath, John Wilson. Kenilworth, F13 was composed in 1936 after a visit to four Lancashire towns and Kenilworth Castle. It has everything – an up-beat march, solemn ceremony, solo fanfares, touches of melancholy and a joyous concluding march. It is music that inspires the spirits and warms the heart whatever the weather.

John Wilson has ranged far and wide across Bliss’s brass band works. A highlight is ‘Things to Come’, a suite for Alexander Korda’s film based on H G Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come. Wells invited Bliss to compose the music for the film even before filming began. Bliss joined the production team to modify and embellish the score during shooting. The excellent sleeve notes note that the March melody is sorrowful in character, suggesting a weary humanity locked in never-ending strife, yearning for peace. Plus ça change.

Diaghilev’s Ballets left a lasting impression on Bliss. He recalled that leaving a ballet had led him to board the bus home with a Nijinsky leap. A meeting with Ninette de Valois led to the composition of his ballet Checkmate. The four dances on from the ballet soar and swirl as Love and Death compete for ascendancy. We hear rapid shifts of mood as elation and despair are played out. Hardly suitable for a wet Sunday afternoon in Deal – try evening twilight.

This wonderful CD encapsulates the moods and circumstances of a day, a week, a lifetime. John Wilson cajoles and nurtures the Black Dyke (have we lost all our Mills?) Band across this spectrum of Bliss and his love of brass.

Bliss: Works for Brass Band

Black Dyke Band conducted by John Wilson

Chandos Digital CHSA 5344