It really is just the Bath Festival now, having amalgamated music and literature. I retain an open mind about this, though I know many people felt that either the literature side or the musical one would suffer. For me it is a return to an earlier phase of the Festival’s history when it included many different sorts of events. Fifty Festivals by Tim Bullamore tells the story of the Festival till the mid-1990s, and to judge by the couple of sample chapters online, it isn’t just in recent years that there have been crises, funding shortages, and changes of direction. I’d love to get my hands on a second-hand copy of this book.
We managed three concerts between us in 2018’s Festival. I went to hear Lars Vogt play Beethoven’s piano concertos no. 1 and 5 with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, directing them from the keyboard. He was seated with his back to the audience, and when he was not actually playing stood up to conduct the longer purely orchestral passages, and remained seated for the shorter ones. It was a remarkable achievement (he had played the other three concertos the previous evening, too). Some ‘gathering notes’ and occasional slight raggedness could be attributed to the absence of a separate conductor, but there was a corresponding gain in that the soloist could impose his interpretation directly on the orchestra. We have all heard concerto performances where conductor and soloist seemed to be at odds with one another.
The Assembly Rooms were almost full, and I was sitting near the back where it was easy to hear (in fact the balance of soloist and orchestra might have been at its best here) but the chairs not so well padded. The hot weather did affect the tuning of the winds from time to time. But I appreciated the book display in the circular hall outside – a benefit of the literature side of the Festival.
I’ll continue our concert reports in another post.