East Neuk at 20
At the Opening Concert of this year’s East Neuk Festival, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Principal Guest conductor paused between the first and second movements of Lars-Erik Larsson’s Pastoral Suite to allow a raucous posse of motorcyclists to pass the Bowhouse before the music continued, but Andrew Manze could do nothing to mitigate the noise of a helicopter overhead during the Andante of Schubert’s Symphony No. 6.
Perhaps the pilot was a Stockhausen fan at the wrong gig, because at the closing concert in the same venue, composer Sally Beamish contrived an event as fascinating as the German’s late 20th century experiment with the Arditti Quartet playing in separate aircraft.
Her piece, Field of Stars, had inspiration every bit as complex, and the demanding task of employing four faithful visiting ensembles in a single work. The Belcea, Castalian, Elias and Pavel Haas Quartets were behind the audience as well as onstage, and each cellist was furnished with a tuned bell-cymbal as a call sign for the group’s location.
Just as the farm building was impressively effective for the SCO’s opener – the programme completed by Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez with the soloist another faithful friend of ENF, Sean Shibe – Beamish made her commission a site-specific triumph to end the 20th edition of the festival.
Weaving a tapestry of international melodies into her compact creation, and exploiting many of the techniques of which the string players are capable along the way, it ended with a medieval hymn-tune that vaguely recalled La Vie En Rose. The composition may have been tailor-made for the space, but thoughtful music producers should surely be able to adapt it to other contexts.
The programmatic setting for its premiere could scarcely have been richer. All 16 players made a luxury string orchestra for the Andante Festivo by Sibelius at the start, with the Castalian’s Finnish first violin Sini Simonen appropriately in the position of concert-master.
Her quartet combined with the Belcea for the performance of Mendelssohn’s youthful Octet that closed the concert, with Corinne Belcea in imperious command and the Belcea’s cellist Antoine Lederlin bossing the start of the Presto finale.
The first half had seen the completion of the festival’s cycle of the Late Quartets of Beethoven, the Pavel Haas showing that the complexity of the second and fourth movements of Opus 135 in F defy its “contract-filler” reputation. The emotive slow movement was admittedly waiting in the composer’s bottom-drawer, but we already knew that from the Belcea’s equally heart-breaking rendition of it as an encore to the huge Opus 131 (for which it had failed to make the cut) in Crail Church two days earlier.
The Beethoven journey had begun in Kilrenny Kirk on Thursday with the Elias playing Opus 127 in E-flat, its big opening chords a bit of a red-herring given the intimacy of the long central Adagio and the inventive playfulness of the music in the later movements. Like the Belcea in Crail, the Elias prefaced the Beethoven with Mozart, but the Castalian opened their concert, of Opus 139 with the Grosse Fuge, with Thomas Ades’s seven-movement Arcadiana, Natalie Loughran’s viola leading the way in water-themed music which takes a beguiling turn into the world of tango half way through.
The quartets were far from the only excursion of the festival programme, the most literal being Saturday’s “Shibe Trail” to three places in Anstruther and through music from the early 1600s to the year before last, played on lute, classical guitar and electric guitar and electronics. Each recital was relatively brief but the range of composition, and multi-disciplined virtuosity Sean Shibe demonstrated was fantastic. From John Dowland to Meredith Monk might not actually seem so far in vocal music terms, but to be taken from one to the other instrumentally was a different journey altogether.
The brief life of Franz Schubert was another thread of the 20th East Neuk, including performances of the song cycles by baritone James Newby and tenor Mark Padmore with pianist Joseph Middleton. Newby’s performance of Die Schone Mullerin was too dramatic for some, but his animated storytelling surely cast fresh light on the familiar sequence.
Employing an impressive range of tone and timbre, Newby’s theatrical reading was clearly addressed to listeners and objects alive in his imagination and it was all too easy to see the babbling brook at his feet in Crail Church. The portrait he drew of the protagonist in these poems was often a disturbing one, the fickle girlfriend ultimately incidental to his existential crisis and bitter and disturbed character.
He and Middleton had clearly worked precisely on the pacing and pauses of the recital, and the pianist’s picture-painting was as essential in what was an unforgettable performance.
So too was the Pavel Haas Quartet’s of Schubert’s Quintet from the last year of his life, cellist Ivan Vokac joining the great collaborators. His line was often at the bottom of the instrument’s range and a little like that of a rhythm section string bass, and the whole work was revealed to be as muscular as this group can be relied upon to find in any music. If that was especially true of Janacek’s String Quartet No 1, which opened the quartet’s Crail recital – and of which they are surely the finest exponents – it was revealing how much the Schubert benefitted from the same approach.
Earlier on the Festival’s last day, a gathering of yet more familiar festival faces celebrated the event’s genesis, inspired by the success of a one-off chamber concert at St Ayle in Cellardyke, featuring Beethoven’s Septet of 1800. A supergroup of chamber musicians gathered in the same place to play the same work, the occasion also remembering cellist and teacher David Watkin, and only slightly diminished by some technical difficulties with the instrument of violinist Alexander Janiczek, which discombobulated even this most experienced of players.
(Pictures: Neil Hanna)
Keith Bruce