Erik Satie, of all composers, certainly wouldn’t have wanted the 150th anniversary of his birth taken too seriously and so the note struck at this year’s Cheltenham festival seems just right. Satie’s Scottish mother offers the mischievous logic for the focus on James MacMillan, Sally Beamish and Judith Weir, and Satie surely would have been gratified to find his often startling originality and his influence on a younger generation of French composers amply acknowledged.
The recital of piano music for four hands given by Ami and Pascal Rogé set Satie in the context both of Debussy and Ravel, and in an astutely chosen sequence of solo pieces by Les Six. Pascal Rogé’s pianism in this repertoire is outstanding. He combined clarity of line with a misty aura in Satie’s Gymnopédie No 1, Gnossienne No 2, and again in Durey’s Carillons. Synchrony, with his wife Ami, is also remarkable and their duets, notably the Poulenc sonata, radiated wit.
Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s foray from their home city down to Cheltenham’s town hall was reflected, with tongue in cheek, in Elgar’s In the South. Inspired by a sojourn in Italy, its warm expansiveness – more tone poem than concert overture – was given a Straussian flourish by Petrenko, and the central extended viola solo was played with much feeling by principal viola Catherine Marwood.
Nicola Benedetti was the soloist in Korngold’s Violin Concerto, bringing a searing intensity to the lyrical melodies and indulging the hoedown high spirits of the finale with a smile. The melancholy vein of Rachmaninov’s Third Symphony is also that of a man in exile. Petrenko underlined the dark Russian soulfulness, yet rigorously avoided any over-sentimentalising. The rapport with his players was always evident, the freedom and exuberance of the symphony at its most romantic actually tightly controlled, and only a comparative lack of resonance of the lower strings – just three desks of cellos and two of double-basses – detracted from the overall tonal balance.
•The Cheltenham music festival continues until 17 July.
