There are various things I miss about the Festival these days: the fly-past of hot-air balloons followed by fireworks on the opening night, and the best-dressed window competition. And there’s no Bath Festival Chorus again this year. But we’ve been to four concerts so far between us and I’ll write about the two I attended.
Like the England cricket team, performers at the Festival this year seem to have been prone to injury and illness, and both concerts had a change of programme and performers. The cellist of Borodin Quartet on Tuesday night was a replacement for the sole original member of the quartet (and one of his pupils). The change of programme brought in Myaskovsky’s last quartet, written the year after he’d been denounced for formalism; I sensed he had written it looking over his shoulder. After Beethoven’s Op. 95 the concert really took wing with Tchaikovsky’s first quartet; until this point I felt the performers hadn’t quite settled into the music, perhaps because of the change of personnel. For a contrasting view of the Myaskovsky, see the Telegraph’s review here.
The following night I joined a party organised by a work collegue to hear Maxim Vengerov. I’ve written elsewhere about the early tickets and late start to this concert. Vengerov cut back his contribution to Mozart’s Adagio K261 and some encore-type pieces near the end. So we lost the Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and with them the opportunity to hear him in an extended work. Neverthess, I was glad to have heard as much of him as I did. With his direct approach, quite lacking in sentimentality but also not emptily virtuosic, he reminds me of great mid-20th century violinists such as Oistrakh.
Vengerov introduced some younger performers for the middle two pieces. Jack Liebeck and Katya Apekisheva played Elgar’s violin sonata which I could tell (I’d not seen a programme at this point) was a late work. It came over as a rather rambling piece, a lot of it slow. Adrian Brendel and Tim Horton played Beethoven’s cello sonata op. 5 no. 2. The slow introduction in particular anticipates the op. 13 piano sonata, though the rest doesn’t rise to the same level.
If I had the power I would invent a special kind of paper for use in concert programmes which would glow red-hot if it were used as a fan. I pay to see as well as hear the performers and it is very distracting to have a bit of paper waved in my line of view. I noticed the offenders (and most people who fanned themselves did so only between pieces) did this less when Vengerov was playing, and I don’t think it was cooler then, so they should have given Adrian Brendel & co. the same courtesy.
June 5: I won’t really have time to write properly about the third concert I attended, Purcell and Dowland performed by Emma Kirkby and Jakob Lindberg in the Assembly Rooms. I was glad of my front-row seat because of the intimate ambience the performers created (she sat down to sing all but the most dramatic of the songs) and the close-up views. (A feature of early-music concerts is how lovely many of the instruments look.)
Just seen in the Bath Life review of the year that Vengerov’s performances of Prokofiev and Shostakovich were among the highlights of the Festival. Ouch! Whoever wrote that just pulled the info out of the programme, and hadn’t been to the concert or even read a review of it.