The Festival is shorter now and largely coincided with half-term, so there was less opportunity to go to concerts, but we managed two.
Some in the family went to hear the Scholtes and Janssens Piano Duo perform in the Assembly Rooms. This was enjoyable, although my daughter preferred the pieces she had encountered only in this medium, such as Mozart’s sonata K381 and Debussy’s En Blanc et Noir to those which were also orchestrated, such as La Valse and Brahms’ Variations ‘on a theme of Haydn’. Perhaps she just missed the orchestra when she knew the orchestral version.
Later on I went to a concert at the Roman Baths, with the Arte Corale of Moscow performing Russian liturgical music. This turned out to be a rather small ensemble, although their (female) conductor occasionally boosted the otherwise all-male group! All the pieces and many of the composers were unknown to me. Some had written church music at times when it was difficult or risky to do so – but without being able to move it on stylistically. The mid-20th century pieces seemed unadventurous compared with even the level of innovation in Anglican church music of the same period. Was the difficulty created by the circumstances they were written in, is the Orthodox musical tradition very resistant to change, or were the composers writing church music just not very original?
The choir stood on one side of the baths and the audience stood or sat around the other sides. The acoustic was not ‘bathroom-like’ but somewhere between an indoor and an outdoor sound. Singing across water is not forgiving and I thought I detected a little raggedness and fluctuating intonation at times – it was the choir’s second concert of the evening. I found my ear gravitating to a couple of quality voices in particular.
An obbligato was provided by a drake which flew in a couple of times, and swam round quacking and looking at the audience. It even took its own curtain call at the end. I gather that it had courted a duck in the Baths and then lost its mate. I don’t know what it should have been performing – the appropriate music from Peter and the Wolf or maybe a Quackoviak?