This year’s Lichfield festival began on the exact centenary of the beginning of the battle of the Somme, and reflections on that anniversary went right through the opening concert, given by Manchester Camerata and Lichfield Cathedral Chorus, conducted by Ben Gernon. Two new works, from the festival’s current composer-in-residence Deborah Pritchard, both dealing in different ways with the Somme offensive, dominated the first half of the programme, and Pritchard was also involved in the reorchestration of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem after the interval, which omitted the orchestral wind (except for a pair of horns) and reassigned their material to the organ.
The cathedral acoustic ensured that few words of the requiem texts could be discerned, and even the soloists, soprano Ailish Tynan and baritone Stephen Gadd, struggled to impose themselves in their movements. But Pritchard’s new pieces made much more of an impression. Her a cappella setting of Sylvan Kamens and Rabbi Jack Riemer’s prayer We Remember Them, conducted by the Lichfield Chorus’s musical director Ben Lamb, was a shapely and restrained piece of choral writing, while her new trumpet concerto, composed for Tine Thing Helseth, proved pithily effective.
Pritchard describes herself as a synaesthetic composer, and the concerto, Seven Halts on the Somme, was a response to canvases by Hughie O’Donoghue marking staging posts for British troops during the campaign. The musical tone, set by the trumpet, is consistently elegiac, and the recurring thematic material changes its character and mood as it is appears in different harmonic contexts; a lot is packed into 15 minutes, and as Helseth demonstrated, the trumpet writing never falters.
- Lichfield festival continues until 9 July. Box office: 01543 412121.
