Since its inception in 2014, artistic directors David Adams and Alice Neary have made a considerable success of this delightful weekend-long festival, their programming astutely balancing classics of the repertoire with lesser-known gems. The pool of 11 musicians is variously assembled, with no single group an established or permanent lineup. Yet their individual credentials as chamber players – over and above their roles as leaders and principals of different orchestras and ensembles – mean they are highly attuned to the acute listening and the intimate give-and-take the chamber music medium demands. Performances are of a very high order; there is never any sense that these musicians have come together ad hoc, for a routine play-through.
This year, the arrival of Claire Booth as soprano soloist in works by Ravel and Schönberg added a further touch of vocal class. In his Chansons Madécasses, Ravel set three of the prose-poems of the Réunion-born Évariste de Forges, vicomte de Parny. In the outer poems, exotic and often erotic, Booth’s combination of perfectly inflected French with lustrous tone was seductive, making the contrasting central poem Aoua! with its fiercely anticolonial stance – influenced by de Parny’s service in French colonial India in the 1780s – all the more startling and dramatic.
Ravel suggested that he could not have composed these Chansons without the example of Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire, and that became apparent in Booth’s performance of the epoch-making monodrama the following evening. Booth is a noted exponent of the distinctive German Sprechgesang (half-spoken, half-sung) style; her ability to characterise words and feelings brings a different kind of expressive intensity to each of the 21 settings of Albert Giraud’s poems, translated by Otto Hartleben. In portraying the moonstruck Pierrot, she was by turns sad, nonchalant and angry, gestures pointing up the flowing curves of the vocal lines, with her stance – sometimes with hands on hips or in her pockets – adding further attitude to the symbolist defiance of poet and clown. Led by Adams, her fellow instrumentalists were in complete harmony.
With such a feeling of mutual sympathy and understanding among the players, it seems invidious to single out individuals. But the contributions of the two cellists, Alice Neary and Philip Higham, in Dvořák’s piano quartet Op 23, Beethoven’s first Razumovsky quartet Op 59 No 1 and Schubert’s Death and the Maiden were notable. The deeply sensitive and insightful interpretation of Debussy’s late cello sonata by Higham with pianist Jâms Coleman was another memorable bonus.
