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.
Thus this occasion should have beautifully fused words/images/sounds. But in the big, boomy room the spoken words of the artist’s introductions and links were barely articulate, the sung words not at all (even from the mouths of such expert communicators as Mary Wiegold and Omar Ibrahim): and the fragility rather than the substantiality of the nice little five-player ensemble was paramount. Only three of the 14 offerings (which included a ditty by Tom Phillips himself, and a gently amorous ‘page from a Humument’ by your reviewer) really broke the barrier — an aggressive number by Harrison Birtwistle, wherein scarcely any of the all-important text was discernible (nor did the programme print the words), and a delicious mini-eclogue with birdsong by Julian Anderson, obviating the problem in the voice’s wordless vocalise.
And Brian Eno, no less, closed the proceedings with a winning rendition of a world-pop-noodle, hypnotic in its amiable banality.
The visual element didn’t coalesce either. Prevented by armed flunkeys (armed with smiles) from exploring the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, one’s eye was confined to the mediocrities in its main salon, notably a huge ersatz-Klimt and a still larger rip-off of Matisse’s late paper cut-outs.
Grander yet, Winchester Cathedral, with the longest nave in the land, final restingplace of its greatest novelist. I attended Evensong on two successive days last week. The Friday was ‘chamber music’ — ministers, singers, congregation embraced within the choirstalls, organ floating above, the sound directed and focused with warm Anglican suavity. That Saturday was a grand festive occasion, all the officiators, from bishop to tiniest chorister, placed in front of the screen and directing their efforts down that longest nave, packed to the aisles with Friends of the Cathedral celebrating their 75th anniversary by commissioning a new altar-cloth, whose reception and dedication on this Patronal feast was also marked by my new setting of the evening Canticles.
This festive event also proved a study in varying degrees of distance and inaudibility. The choir-and-organ sound, so firm and true when tethered to their stalls, tended to lose impact in the main body of the enormous building. We got a general picture — energy for putting down the mighty from their seat, tenderness for the humble and meek and ‘remembering his mercy’, traumatised somnolence for the old man awaiting, raised into eloquence by his hopes’ fulfilment just before death quenches his light — rather than the detail: while in the choral procession to St Swithun’s tomb the sound vanished before our eyes; we had to strain the ears to catch a faint quavering strain of the prayer sung on his birth/death-day every July since kingdom come. Only a good old communal roar from 600-odd voices in the closing hymn truly made the vaulting ring.
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