The opening concert of the ninth English Music Festival (EMF) was very much in line with the EMF’s mission to give performances of unpublished, unperformed and rarely heard works by English composers, particularly from the first half of the last century.
The substance of the concert came in the second half, with the première of what had been an unfinished work by the Morris dancing Oxford graduate and teacher at Radley College, George Butterworth. This was followed by Gerald Finzi’s underperformed cello concerto.
Both pieces have interesting back stories. Butterworth, who was killed by a sniper in 1916 aged just 31, destroyed a number of manuscripts he was not satisfied with in case he did not return from France and have the opportunity to revise them. He must have rated what he had done on Fantasia for Orchestra though as it survived the cull, and tonight’s conductor Martin Yates, having obtained a copy from the Bodleian, completed it.
The music itself had a mournful majestic sweep. Even when punctuated with the occasional more upbeat passage, muted brass called us back to its central elegiac motif. The piece ended with a quiet trumpet salute, the last notes of Butterworth’s manuscript which Yates had cleverly transposed, and which became the finale of a moving performance by the orchestra, avoiding the trap of becoming maudlin.
The first movement of Finzi’s cello concerto is all turmoil, anger and despair, perhaps because when he wrote the concerto Finzi knew he had terminal cancer. The slow second movement, which has a lyrical, transcendent quality, perhaps denotes Finzi coming to terms with his situation, while third movement is a joyful life-affirming rondo full of jaunty impish fun.
Raphael Wallfisch gave it a heartfelt performance, triumphantly meeting the many challenges the piece makes not only on cellists’ technique, and their capacity for emotional empathy, but also on their stamina, for instance in the two long taxing solos in the dark first movement (if this had been a jazz club the audience would have been whooping and applauding). He absolutely revelled in the virtuosic pizzicato opening of the third movement and showed it with smiles flitting across his face. Wallfisch’s mother is a surviving member of the notorious Girls’ Orchestra of Auschwitz, the cellist Anita-Lasker Wallfisch, and maybe it is not too fanciful to suggest he might have been making a connection between his family history and the nuances of Finzi’s composition.
The concert had begun with the first British performance - seventy years after its premiere in New York in 1941 - of The New Age Overture by the eight times married Richard Arnell who became a pioneer of electronic music. The piece was influenced by the German composer Paul Hindemith and also Vaughan Williams, and the first half included very early actual Vaughan Williams, his Bucolic Suite of 1900, which had been withdrawn from performance for a long period.
For me the most interesting piece of this half though was Havergal Brian’s English Suite no 3. Slow and pastoral alternated with fast and loud and there was restlessness in the music and the orchestration. One combination of instruments had hardly been introduced before Brian was on to the next one. It was almost like a quote from the Dreaming Spires, ‘everything all the time.’ These characteristics, it seems, are typical Havergal Brian and if his aim was to keep you off balance he certainly succeeded with me. Not an easy listen and not, I imagine, easy for the orchestra to play.
There was a rather strange prequel to the concert with the audience standing and singing Parry’s setting of Jerusalem, which apparently now is a tradition at the start of each festival. While the EMF has rightly been praised for highlighting the unjustifiably neglected, questions have been raised about its tendency to avoid pieces with strong links to developments in European music and further afield. A quick scroll through past programmes suggests that tonight’s performance of the Arnell piece was an exception, and that the EMF indeed is inclined to favour compositions which sound identifiably English to the exclusion of more European sounding works. For example, in the nine years of the festival there have been no performances of anything by Elizabeth Lutyens (1906-1983) who was influenced by the European avant-guarde of her day. However if the EMF keeps coming up with excellent performances of pieces as substantial as the Butterworth and the Finzi, this criticism is likely to be outweighed by praise.