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Chipping Campden Festival 2009: A  Preview from Roger Jones (RJ)


To a casual visitor Chipping Campden may seem a idyllic, but sleepy, Cotswold town in which nothing much happens. But scratch below the surface and a very different picture emerges.  This was the place where Charles Robert Ashbee chose to set up his famous Guild of Craftsmen in 1902 and where a century later the idea of an annual musical festival was born in the mind of local wine merchant Charlie Bennett.

The Guild eventually foundered, but the recently opened Court Barn Museum bears testament to the important legacy of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The music festival, by contrast, is going from strength to strength and 2009 marks the eighth year of its existence.

A music festival in a small country town sounds unlikely to set the nation alight, but just have a glance at the list of performers. The Florestan Trio, the Nash Ensemble, Stephen Kovacevich and Boris Berezovsky don't normally turn out for any old music festival, and a number of other famous names will be performing in the wool church of St James as well.
 The Purcell and Handel anniversaries, for instance, will be commemorated in style with a programme of music performed by Emma Kirkby and Florilegium. The Nash Ensemble will celebrate the Haydn anniversary in their concert at which Susan Bickley will sing his entrancing cantata Arianna a Naxos.

Piers Lane is a noted interpreter of Chopin and concert he is performing sounds very imaginative. He will play the Preludes before supper and later in the evening the audience will return to the church to hear the Nocturnes played by candlelight. There will be more Chopin a few days later when Boris Berezovsky plays Godowsky's notoriously difficult transcriptions of the Etudes.

St James' Church hosts another candle-lit concert devoted to the music of the Russian Orthodox Church with its distinctive sonorities.  The wonderful choral group Tenebrae will be performing settings by Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Chesnokov, Tchaikovsky and others together with John Tavener's Hymn to the Mother of God and Funeral Ikos.  The youthful Pavel Haas Quartet from Prague win acclaim wherever they perform and they return to Chipping Campden to play Haydn and Janacek. Another promising newcomer is soprano Kate Royal who will perform Schumann and Brahms with Graham Johnson.

Last year the Festival inaugurated the Festival Academy Orchestra in which young players perform alongside experienced musicians under Thomas Hull's astute direction. This initiative was hailed a success and will be repeated in 2009 with Ruth Rogers, Laurence Power and Michael Collins as soloists. Paul Lewis, who is the Festival President, will be performing Beethoven's Emperor Concerto with the Orchestra on the final night.

In addition to the evening concerts the Festival has a series of lunchtime recitals by young musicians who are starting to make a name for themselves. One of these is the young pianist Ching Yu Hu who made a big impression at the 2008 Arthur Rubinstein competition in Tel Aviv.

For those with a penchant for opera there will be an afternoon of operatic highlights at Longborough Opera House nearby; and with Stratford on Avon just down the road visitors to the area can also indulge their appetite for drama.

The Chipping Campden Music Festival runs from May 12th to 23rd. Full details are available from the website: www.campdenmusicfestival.co.uk

Roger Jones


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