British music, especially that of contemporary composers, has traditionally featured large at Cheltenham, and this year the festival, positioned time-wise between the Diamond Jubilee and the Olympics, seemed to demand a particular British focus.
Settings of Thomas Hardy and WH Hudson by Britten (Winter Words), Finzi (A Young Man's Exhortation) and Tippett (Boyhood's End) made up the moving sequence of songs, music and images in Before Life and After. In a modern equivalent of a dramatic scena, seen against the background of video footage created by film-maker Netia Jones, this reflection on time, and on life and death through the eyes of man and boy, was vividly realised by tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook. Evocative as the visual element often was with its grainy texture and nostalgic feel, it was Gilchrist's immaculate shaping of the phrases and Tilbrook's expressive detail that brought a lump to the throat.
Alexander Goehr will be 80 in August and, in his new trio Largo Siciliano for violin, horn and piano premiered by the Nash Ensemble, he clearly enjoyed pitting himself against the Baroque masters in terms of contrapuntal and structural approach. Yet curiously, it was the distinctly lyrical aura of German Romanticism in the horn-writing that may ensure its place in the repertoire alongside the Brahms Op. 40 Trio.
The BBC Singers gave no fewer than four premieres, each in their way extraordinary, in a towering performance directed by David Hill, at Cheltenham College Chapel. Hugh Wood , another octogenarian, matched the intensity of Ezra Pound's words in From the Pisan Cantos LXXXI; Judith Bingham achieved a striking tautness of form in her set of nine miniatures entitled London Haiku, while John Tavener's Unto the End of the World combined Hindu and Christian precepts in its aspiration to cosmic serenity. Rautavaara's sonorous Mass was also given its UK premiere. But all these were rather upstaged, first by the young Finn Lauri Supponen's new Cheltenham commission The Dordrecht Humaphone – a choral scena reflecting on the tuning of human vocal chords, by turn philosophical and comic, made almost operatic by the lively contribution of soloists tenor Edward Goater and baritone Edward Price – and also by Jonathan Harvey's ritualistic Marahi, with its menagerie of animal noises.
