Robin Holloway

Festival spirit

Perhaps unwisely, the museum at Gloucester prominently displays a large aerial photograph of the city...

Perhaps unwisely, the museum at Gloucester prominently displays a large aerial photograph of the city, revealing in one what the shocked pedestrian discovers slowly on foot: the huge proportion of the centre flattened for ghastly car parks, more devastating in their seeming permanence than the recent flooding, of which little trace remained on my four-day visit, so rapid and efficient the cleaning-up. By my third day, domestic tap water was declared safe to drink, restaurants and pubs were operating normally, and the millions of plastic bottles had served their purpose.

Most efficient of all was the rescue of this year’s Three Choirs Festival, every event in place (with some changed venues) according to plan. This convivial and gregarious affair wore its customary hospitable smile; and since it centres upon Cathedral and Close, one of England’s loveliest, the eye was unaffronted even as the ear was delighted. Present as composer-in-residence, I entered into the spirit with eager gratitude.

Music in the Cathedral itself needs faith, hope and charity, except for the very particular repertory actually written with its woolly resonance in mind. Vaughan Williams’s evergreen Serenade to Music, 16 fresh-voiced young soloists compacting into a well-focused choir, sounded out full and clear, the opaque idiom and samey mood-and-momentum of Hymnus Paradisi, Herbert Howells’s finest hour, glowed through the thick scoring and relative unwieldiness of the large adult chorus. A snatch of Gerontius heard in rehearsal the next morning confirmed equally the mighty building’s rightness in the right hands, and the continuing supremacy of Elgar as genius loci. My own orchestral transcription of Debussy’s late two-piano masterpiece en blanc et noir, sandwiched between Music and Paradise, survived because of its transparency, the textures light enough to penetrate the vast spaces even unto the back row wherein I sat, hard up against the west window, watching the performers hard up against the organ screen half a mile away.

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