“If you bake a cake, you don’t want to stuff your face with the whole lot, you want to share it.” This was the mantra of Peter Cropper, first violinist of the Lindsay String Quartet, and later the founder of Music in the Round, the organisation that now organises the Sheffield Chamber Music Festival. This is still the governing ethos of this annual festival – ‘if you make it, you want to share it.’ Over a week built around two weekends the resident chamber group, Ensemble 360, together with a guest curator, produce a variety of experiences of the intimacy, profound emotion and technical bravura that chamber music can uniquely engender. The emphasis is very much on variety. This is not a traditional chamber music exposition in the manner of the Wigmore Hall. There are a variety of locations, spread out across the city of Sheffield, some of them that will never have hosted chamber music before. There is variety of programming too, with many works from different periods juxtaposed in ways that are unfamiliar. Finally, there is a welcoming variety of genres, with jazz very much included, a children’s opera and a community concert. Moreover, with Claire Booth as curator and performer this year, there was plenty of vocal music too, with her voice and others in intriguing combinations.
With twenty events across the whole festival, I can only give you a flavour of the rich rewards available and will focus on just three concerts, each of which represents a significant and central strand of the music-making as a whole.
The Festival commenced with a bang, as Booth strode out into the studio theatre at the Crucible and launched straight into Judith Weir’s one-woman opera King Harald’s Saga. Originally written in 1979, it still seems a strikingly modern and challenging work on numerous fronts. The singer has to portray, without accompaniment, a whole variety of male characters, describe a fierce battle scene, and provide an elegiac postlude. Booth rose to the challenge as a natural storyteller, communicating to an audience seated in the round with natural confidence and technical assurance. The story is not well known – it is essentially the prequel to the Battle of Hastings – but she took us through every violent twist and turn while finding the emotional resources for the long sections of melismatic lament from the women and saints shaking their heads at the scale of waste that war brings – a very topical message, for all the Scandinavian remoteness of the saga.
There was virtuosity of a different kind from the instrumentalits in Birstwistle’s instrumental Cortege, in which each of the 14 players got a chance to display their skills in turn in the best democratic manner of chamber music. For all its spikiness, this was a good formal preparation for a version of the Brahms’ first Serenade which, in turn, was a revelation. I am used to hearing this work in recordings for full orchestra; but here, with only ten players, the six movements sped past with a lightness of touch and delicacy of expression that made me immediately want to hear sections again. It was like a seeing a painting anew after old varnish was removed. In a work with so many sections and points of dialogue between instruments you felt the benefit of an ensemble that really know one another well – as themes were tossed around you could feel confident they would be securely picked up, and when moments of rubato intervened it was clearly felt collectively on an intuitive level. Nowhere was this clearer than in the pulling back before the coda of the final Rondo which felt like a wholly natural point of culmination.
The following evening took us into a different world, with Booth returning, but this time in the company of jazz pianist Gwilym Simcock and members of Ensemble 360. The focus here was on improvisation around works we know usually in a fixed unchanging form. In the larger framework of the main Crucible Theatre, we encountered a very adventurous programme in which, inevitably, some arrangements were more successful than others. Rather like cabaret, this sort of intervention divides opinions, but it was never less than thought-provoking. Quite often ‘less was more’, and on this principle the first, wholly instrumental half of the evening, worked better. The riffs around Debussy’s Children’s Corner developed as quite natural meditations on these delicate little pieces, with some exquisite dialogue between Simcock and Rob Buckland on saxophone, moments of puckish murmuration on the strings, and delicately perfumed piano chords that seemed a convincing extension of Debussy’s sound world. Simcock moved up a gear in a torrential cadenza leading into the final movement that, once again, felt like a plausible framing device. Similarly impressive was a delicately graceful arrangement of Ravel’s famous Pavane in which the instruments emerged and withdrew in an impressive blend, just like dappled light in a forest.
The second half revolved around improvisations around a variety of well known items from the realm of classical song. Here many of the improvisations struck me, for all of their virtuosity, as fighting against the grain of the song. The accompaniments were often too busy, risking overwhelming the line of the voice. There is often a reason why the original version of a song setting ends up the way it is, with the accompaniment as a harmonic underscore rather than a rivalrous soloist. Just as some poetry is hard to set to music because it has a complete, fully-formed music of its own, so too Kurt Weill and Henry Purcell knew what they were about and gave the voice room to breathe. The arrangements that worked best were those where there was a strong dramatic narrative to expound and illustrate – so Percy Grainger’s Bold William Taylor was much enhanced by the interventions of the players, and an excerpt from Gurrelieder, a great orchestral work in the original, needed multiple lines to succeed. A jazz standard encore, Blame it on my youth, just for voice and piano, hit exactly the right, gently inflected minimalist note, and offered a satisfying conclusion to the evening and an instance of what perhaps might have been preferable elsewhere in the second half.
Perhaps the best example of the bold and individual programming in the festival came a few days into the week with a dawn concert located in the heart of Sheffield’s Victorian cemetery. Amid grandiose ivy-clad monuments, still stands a Noncomformist Chapel in the form of an impressive classiccal temple. Here amid the real dawn chorus we gathered to hear a fascinating sequence of music for flute and piano devoted to musical representation of birdsong. All credit to Juliette Bausor and Tim Horton for performing this programme twice at such an hour as the candlelight of 5 am morphed into the brilliant sunshine of breakfast hours. Messiaen was there front and centre, of course, allowing us to judge his variety of approach from vague suggestion to pin-sharp accuracy in sonic reproduction. But there was also plently of far less familiar, highly rewarding music from Telemann to Martinu, dispatched with bravura flair by Bausor. The morning was capped off with a tour of the cemetery from Tom McKinney to appreciate the real birdsong still echoing around this serene landscape as the city gradually arose for the day ahead.
These imaginatively drafted, expertly executed concerts were only a small part of an overall trajectory that stretched our knowledge and understanding of chamber repertory in an energising way, while also extending an embrace to different locations and aspects of the history and life of the city. This year’s festival therefore remained fully true to the searching, uncompromising but inclusive vision of Peter Cropper and its other founders. When you factor in the recent revival of the city, its fine cuisine and above all its beautiful and accessible natural surroundings, such as the Porter Valley, it is hard to imagine another chamber music celebration in this country that can offer so much rich stimulus within the scope of a single week each Spring.