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Cheltenham Music Festival 2009: A Preview from John Quinn (JQ)


The sixty-fifth Cheltenham Music Festival runs from 3 to 18 July. Meurig Bowen’s first festival as Director in 2008 was an auspicious start to his leadership of the festival. This year he has a couple of principal themes. One is to use the sixty-fifth festival, understandably, as a reason for looking back at some previous festival premières. Another is the celebration of some anniversaries. Anniversaries are the staple diet of festivals and, rightly, Cheltenham gets in on the act. There isn’t space within the programme, I’m sure, to feature in depth all the composers whose anniversaries fall in 2009. Sensibly, Mr Bowen has restricted himself to just two and in a refreshingly different way. He’s used Haydn’s anniversary as the “excuse” to celebrate 250 years of the string quartet while the Mendelssohn anniversary provides the impetus to celebrate Jewish music.

There are seventy events listed in the prospectus and in a short preview such as this it’s not feasible to do more than scratch the surface of the festival programme. With that caveat, therefore, here goes with a personal selection of highlights.

Let’s look at the revisited premières first of all. Very appropriately the final concert features the Hallé Orchestra, which provided the backbone of so many early Cheltenham Festivals when they were led by Sir John Barbirolli. The orchestra is in vintage form these days and on this occasion it’s Edward Gardner, the Music Director of English National Opera, who brings them to Cheltenham (18 July). Their programme includes the Sibelius Fifth Symphony (a Barbirolli speciality, of course) and Britten’s Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes. This concert work was premièred at the very first Cheltenham Festival in 1945, a mere five days after the opera itself was first heard. Also on the programme will be Overture, Waltz and Finale from Powder her Face. This is a reworking by Thomas Adès of music from his opera, first heard in Cheltenham in 1996. There’ll be a chance to hear Alun Hoddinott’s First Clarinet Concerto - a 1954 première – in a concert by the Festival Academy (11 July) and the same concert includes selections from Nicholas Maw’s Life Studies, which was first heard at the 1974 Festival.

The 2009 festival will feature no less than twelve premières from a wide variety of composers. These include Sir Harrison Birtwistle, Sally Beamish. Alexander Goehr and Michael Zev Gordon, who actually has two premières.

Each year the festival ventures a few miles outside Cheltenham to the glorious surroundings of Tewkesbury Abbey. One of the most enticing offerings in the 2009 programme will be the appearance there of the Choir of Trinity College, Cambridge. Their current Director of Music is one of the finest British choral conductors, Stephen Layton. The chance to hear him direct the choir in music by Bach, Finzi, David Briggs and others should be grasped by all lovers of choral music (6 July).

An equally attractive choral concert will be given in another superb building, Gloucester Cathedral. The Cathedral Choir and their Director of Music, Adrian Partington, will perform a fascinatingly diverse programme of psalm settings. The works include Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, Parry’s I was Glad and Handel’s Dixit Dominus. This programme cleverly picks up a raft of themes – Jewish music and several anniversaries – but even without these connections it’s an attractive proposition in its own right (11 July).

On a more intimate scale, Stephen Isserlis will be partnered by Connie Shih in a recital of music for cello and piano by Schumann and Mendelssohn. The venue will be the Pittville Pump Room, a perfect venue for chamber music (10 July). The same building will be the venue for a piano recital by Angela Hewitt, who’ll perform music by Mendelssohn, Handel, Haydn and by the composer with whom she’s so strongly identified, Bach (14 July.)

At the start of his introduction to the festival programme, Meurig Bowen dismisses the notion that the festival contains “something for everyone”. He’s right, of course, but I’d say he’s had a pretty good stab at providing just that.

Full details of the complete festival programme can be obtained at www.cheltenhamfestivals.com or from the Festival Box Office at Town Hall, Imperial Square, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL50 1QA, United Kingdom. The Box Office telephone number is 0844 576 7979

John Quinn


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