This year’s main theme is Russia, introduced in the Festival’s opening concert with a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony by Brabbins and the CBSO. The first half of this concert will feature a new work, entitled Eden, by recent British Composer Awards winner Julian Anderson and Bartók’s Violin Concerto No 2, performed by Moscow-trained violinist Viktoria Mullova. Tchaikovsky’s symphonic work will be the subject of further exploration during the Festival’s opening weekend, as Brabbins and the Salomon Orchestra embark on a Tchiakovskyathon at Cheltenham Town Hall on 3 July. This offers the opportunity to hear all six of Tchaikovsky ‘s numbered symphonies in the course of a day. Brabbins will bring an authentic Baltic air to this and all the Russian works that he conducts during the Festival: his protean abilities are founded in the training he received in St Petersburg (then Leningrad) from Ilya Musin, whose other students included Temirkanov, Gergiev, Bychkov and Sinaisky. Shostakovich, Stravinsky and more ... 2005 also sees the start of a three-year celebration of the Shostakovich string quartets, the first five of which will be performed this year by the Rosamunde, Callino, Lindsay, Petersen, and Brodsky quartets respectively. In addition, Shostakovich’s small-scale works for violin and piano (Viviane Hagner, 5 July), piano quintet (The Lindsays, 7 July), ‘cello and piano (Steven Isserlis, 11 July), organ (Robert Houssart, 6 July) and songs for baritone and piano (Roderick Williams, 10 July) will receive performances in the first half of the Festival. Other Russian composers whose works will be particularly prominent throughout the Festival include Stravinsky, Mussorgsky, Prokofiev and Rachmaninov. A selection of Rachmaninov’s solo piano works (Rustem Hayroudinoff, 11 July) and Prokofiev’s cello sonata (Steven Isserlis, 11 July) are among the items of chamber music being performed, while at the other end of the spectrum are performances of Rachmaninov’s Vespers (Huddersfield Choral Society, 10 July) and a concert that will bring together two early C20th orchestral masterpieces: Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 1, played by Russian-born pianist Nikolai Demidenko, and Rachmaninov’s 2nd symphony, performed by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra under Alexander Polianichko (15 July). Festival highlights In ‘What makes Russian Music Russian?’ (2 July), the first of six designated Family Events during the Festival, flamboyant Russian cellist Alexander Ivashkin will lead a lecture presentation that includes works by four of these well-known composers as well as other celebrated names, arranged chronologically to give a sense of the history of Russian composition from the 18th Century to the present day. Beyond embodying the Festival’s main theme, this event represents just one of the ways in which Brabbins hopes to develop new and younger audiences, by providing opportunities to get inside the music. Brabbins will himself lead a conducting masterclass on the final day of the Festival with the Brandon Hill Chamber Orchestra, offering genuine insights into the creation of Hadyn’s colourful ‘London’ Symphony, No 104. There is also the opportunity for audiences to get better acquainted with some major performing artists that are taking root in Cheltenham for a period rather than giving only one concert, namely Viktoria Mullova and resident artists the Florestan Trio. The Florestan Trio provides a major strand with performances of Beethoven’s Piano Trios across four chamber concerts during the Festival’s opening week, while Viktoria Mullova, described by The Daily Telegraph as “not only an astonishing violinist and probingly individual musician but an unsurpassed communicator”, will follow her performance in the Festival’s opening concert with a vastly contrasting, contemporary programme on 3 July, alongside her husband, the cellist Matthew Barley, and the experimental ensemble Between the Notes (another Family Event). The philosophy of Between the Notes - “to challenge the relationships between performer and public, between professional and non-professional” - has a strong resonance with the Festival’s own aims: a means of involving audiences and encouraging performers’ interaction with them are factors in many of this year’s performances, particularly those involving film and visual art. Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale Amongst this year’s staged events are Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale, acted and performed by violinist Anthony Marwood and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (1 July), and Opera North’s dramatic production of Schubert’s Winterreise, sung by Andrew Foster-Williams and set against a filmed backdrop of evocative landscape images (6 July). I Fagiolini will be cheered back to Cheltenham with three more performances of The Full Monteverdi, performed amongst the dining audience of the Daffodil restaurant, and will later collaborate with The Opera Group in a new version of Aristophanes’ comic satire, The Birds (4 July), composed by Ed Hughes. Hughes has also composed a new score to accompany Eisenstein’s silent film Battleship Potemkin, created to commemorate the failed 1905 Russian uprising, which will be screened on 12 July. The late-night concert on 12 July will also include visuals in the form of artwork by Gillian Lever, which will form the backdrop for a performance of Haydn’s Seven Last Words from the Cross by the London Haydn Quartet. A week earlier, the audience will also have the chance to view the sculptures of the Quenington Gardens which provided the inspiration for a new work for violin and cello by Deirdre Gribbin, before the work is given its world première by Marianne Thorsen and Paul Watkins at St Swithin’s Church. Gribbin’s musical response represents one of many new works being aired for the first time during the Festival’s three weeks, reflecting Brabbins’ belief that “artists have a duty to keep renewing the repertoire and to bring before the public brilliant performances of the newest pieces”; he himself has conducted over 100 major premieres in the last dozen years. Resident throughout this year’s Festival will be husband and wife composers Dmitri Smirnov and Elena Firsova and their daughter Alissa Firsova. Alissa, a formidable talent as both composer and pianist, will perform a recital on 13 July of works including a piece written for her by her mother, while father, mother and daughter will hear premières of their own new works during the Festival. Paintings by Alissa’s brother Philip, created in response to this new music, will be exhibited in the Pitville Pump Room throughout the Festival. Contemporary agenda Also high on this year’s contemporary agenda is the celebration of the work of Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘enfant terrible’ of the 1960s. His student, the English composer Jonathan Harvey, and his son, the composer and trumpet virtuoso, Markus Stockhausen, will be in residence during the Festival’s final weekend. A performance of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung by the vocal group Rubythroat on 15 July kicks off this mini fest and is sandwiched by a collection of cutting-edge concerts from the Festival Players, a hand-picked ensemble of established musicians and a parallel group of music students, the Academy Players. Packed with premières by composers including Phillip Neil Martin, Huw Watkins, Dominika Tabakova and Peter Maxwell Davies, the Festival Players’ concerts (14 & 16 July) will provide the perfect focus for the celebration of contemporary music. Harvey’s Curve with Plateaux and The Riot will be performed in these concerts, while his choral works – I love the Lord and Praise ye the Lord – form startling contrasts to the early renaissance works of Palestrina and Guerrero in Gloucester Cathedral Choir’s programme on 14 July. Harvey’s orchestral work, Tranquil Abiding, also provides an atmospheric opening to the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s programme on 15 July. Jazz residency and Gamelan Markus Stockhausen appears as both composer and performer during his residency in Cheltenham. A new work for jazz trio, co-commissioned with the BBC for the Cheltenham Jazz Festival in April, will be re-worked for larger ensemble and performed in the Festival Players’ opening concert (14 July). Markus himself will take to the stage two days later alongside his wife, the clarinettist Tara Boumann, performing here on the bassett horn, in a programme of contemporary classical and jazz-based improvisations. Other strands running through this year’s Festival include a series of early music concerts by well-known interpreters, including Sonnerie, the Corelli Orchestra, and Rachel Podger and I Fagiolini. There is also a significant focus on young artists (9 concerts in total), and - on permanent view in the Pittville Pump Room - a new Indonesian gamelan made especially for the Festival that will be used for an open workshop and performance on Tuesday 5 July. The Cheltenham Music Festival begins on Friday 1 July 2005 and ends on Sunday 17 July 2005. For details of the events and ticket availability, check out the Cheltenham Festivals website. |
