Unlikely situations

Summer Festival Time: when the music-loving British populace flocks or straggles to concerts in a variety of unsuitable venues, all the way from mighty monuments like (dare one say) St Paul’s or the Albert Hall to Little Bethel and the Quaker Meeting House, the Old Forge, the Stately Home, ex-quaysides and industrial structures, parks, squares, pavements.

I’ve several such unlikely places to report on this month. A first-ever visit to Garsington Opera was a surprise; for the gawky Heath-Robinson-ish thing run up against the old stone manor to cover audience, stage and pit proved possessed of a real acoustic — clear yet sonorous, neither too distant nor too in-your-face, and better for balance and diction than many a more permanent theatre. The grounds, with the glorious sweeping panorama of the Thames valley and the gardens where gilded socialites and socialists languished and lusted, were more poetic than the severely minimalist sets for Rimsky-Korsakov’s May Night. Decently produced, well sung and acted, lovingly shaped under Elgar Howarth…yet nothing can cajole or alarm this formulaic proto-Soviet kitsch into dramatic life; while the music, infallibly euphonious and regular, seems to compose itself by numbers while-you-wait.

Differently vivid expectations were disappointed by an evening in the principal gallery of Burlington House, where a colourful gathering flopped on cushions or sat on tight-wedged phalanxes of stacking-chairs for an event put together by and in honour of Tom Phillips, an artist versatile in virtually every visual medium, and no mean writer of words, who also dabbles in musical composition. He has been engaged most of his life in engagingly overlapping all these arts’ edges, wittily and fruitfully extending and contracting, occluding and revealing.

In lieu of a conclusion to his Slade lectures at Oxford he put on this concert (in the Holywell Music Room, which must have been just right), now brought to London (not so good); for it soliciting miniature settings from composer-friends of phrases from his enchanting ‘Humument’, the unique ‘treated novel’ whose each successive issue over the years enriches, thickens, diverts more deeply and more often the uncomplaining original.