Festivals: Smaller Festivals
A music festival does not need to be enormous, with multi-million pound expenses and world-wide publicity. As I said at the beginning of this look at festivals, it might just be a way for a community to come together with some guests to make music. Or it might be a way to celebrate one particular composer or artist and keep alive his or her memory. There are so many……
Cornwall, England
In 1958, a musical priest at the Collegiate Church of St Endellion in north Cornwall invited some friends to come and help him restore the old church. While there, they put on some concerts for themselves, some tourists and the locals, and thus, the St Endellion Festival was born. A young and enthusiastic Cambridge graduate emerged sometime later as a leading figure, and his influence turned the festival into a bigger event. This was Richard Hickox, and up until his tragic early death in 2008, singers and players flocked to Cornwall to work with this inspiring figure. No fees were paid, and everything was shared, including cleaning and other rather menial tasks, but everyone mucked in in a true spirit of English camaraderie. It helps that St Endellion is a delightful place, the weather is largely tranquil, and the quality of music-making extremely high. I worked fairly frequently with Richard, and so was invited down to the Festival to sing Swallow in a concert version of Britten’s opera, ‘Peter Grimes’. Richard conducted, and a starry cast gave a splendid performance. Mark Padmore (who took on the post of artistic director after Richard’s death) sang Grimes and Ingrid Attrot sang Ellen. I’ve lost my cast list, but I remember it was the first time I met Roderick Williams, who I think sang Ned Keene. I also remember that I was OK about the no money thing, but less thrilled by the jolly camaraderie. I was originally assigned a room to share with a French violinist, but incessant practising and my dislike of sharing a room with anyone other than my wife, persuaded me to ask for accommodation elsewhere. Fortunately, I had my car with me, so was able to find a room in a big, shared house a couple of miles out of the village, with other singers. This at a stroke removed the noise of endless violin playing (singers practice much less than instrumentalists) and the necessity to muck in with communal eating, something I find difficult to cope with. Despite the huge musical success of the Grimes, it was my only visit to St Endellion – perhaps the grumpy Scottish bloke didn’t quite fit in to that quintessentially English environment! It didn’t stop me working many times again with Richard Hickox, and I must say that I found his Tiggerish enthusiasm marvellously attractive. His early death was a tragedy in so many different ways.
Bermuda
One of my favourite smaller festivals, and you can probably work out why, was the Bermuda Festival. Stuck on a sub-tropical island in the middle of a British winter, singing Mozart, was not an unpleasant way to make a living. I went twice, once for ‘Cosí fan Tutte’ and then for ‘The Marriage of Figaro’, with that wonderful small company, Midsummer Opera. The brainchild of two couples, the Privetts and the Skewes, with the fine Baroque conductor and harpsichordist, David Roblou, and based in the Skewes’ garden in Ealing, Midsummer Opera had already performed several Handel operas by the time we were invited to Bermuda. ‘Atalanta’ and ‘Acis and Galatea’ had raised the company’s profile, with reviews in all the main British broadsheets (unimaginable now), and so we found ourselves Bermuda bound. The Cosí deal allowed for partners to accompany us and so Fran came too. It was a wonderful trip, with sunny days, glorious beaches beside a deep blue sea, many “dark and stormy” cocktails (rum and ginger beer) and an all-inclusive hotel (our first experience of the phenomenon – Me: “What? You mean the drinks are all free?” “Yes, sir!”)! The production, by Alan Privett, set in the British Raj, was very clever, and almost made me like my character, Don Alfonso (see my Blog about Mozart on EMR), and the singing was excellent. We were invited back a year or so later, minus the partners sadly, to sing ‘Figaro’, which was another lovely experience. I gave my tried and trusted Doctor Bartolo, and we had another success. The only sour note was on our return journey, when having flown out direct from London we had to come back via Boston. One of our cast was South African, and, since we had no idea we would be passing through the USA, no visas had been obtained. The fact that we were simply in transit was not enough for our friends in the US Border Force, who, since we were deemed to be in America since leaving Bermuda (there is a complicated passport system at work), could not allow a South African to set foot in their country. Our poor colleague, a lovely soprano who sang the Countess wonderfully, was removed from the plane at gunpoint, and held in isolation until we embarked on our flight to London several hours later. Crazy!
Anyway, we got home safely, and the memories of Bermuda remain. It’s a lovely island, and the Festival was well planned and of a generally decent standard.
Gloucestershire, England
Those same Privetts again invited me to sing in another fantastic festival a few years later, Longborough. It was conceived and financed by a marvellously eccentric entrepreneur, Martin Graham, who had grown up in the Cotswolds (rolling hills and valleys in western England, primarily Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, famous for quaint villages with houses made of Jurassic limestone, which turns a honey yellow colour as it ages), and who had developed a love of the music of Richard Wagner. Having built a house for himself and his wife, Lizzie, he decided to develop his chicken shed into an opera house. I was in at the beginning of his Wagner adventure, and, using the cut-down version that had been written for the City of Birmingham Touring Opera in 1990 by Jonathan Dove (and in which I had sung Fafner and Hagen), we started to put together a Ring Cycle, in which I sang the King of the Gods, Wotan. I too am a Wagner fan, but never imagined I would sing Wotan, as it lies a bit too high for me and also necessitates an ability to sing very loudly over an enormous orchestra. However, having seen how the role was shortened when I sang with CBTO, I realised when it was suggested by Alan and Jenny Privett, that it was possible. The fact that I had recently started to work with the voice teacher, Tony Roden, who had extended my voice upwards, made my decision easier. We started, as did Wagner, with ‘Das Rheingold’, where the role of Wotan is less stressful than in the later operas, and the success of that series of performances led me to believe that I could do it. It was originally conducted by the fine musician Alistair Dawes, and then Anthony Negus took over. A splendid cast had been assembled of top-notch professionals, and the unlikely enterprise went from strength to strength. Around 2000, the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, underwent a huge restoration project, and somehow Martin managed to acquire the old stalls seats from the ROH. He added a Palladian frontage and expanded the public areas, as well as enlarging the orchestra pit, and by 2002 we were able to put on several cycles of the whole (abbreviated) Ring, garnering five star reviews from the main British broadsheets, and several continental opera magazines. At this point, I realised that I couldn’t work every summer exclusively at Longborough, so having reached such a heady peak I decided to bring my personal Longborough adventure to an end. Since then, it has gone on to stage full performances of the Ring, with a fully extended pit for Wagner’s orchestration, and continues to this day, giving experience to the younger generation of singers coming through the ranks. It was a wonderful time for me, and I cannot thank the Privetts and the Grahams enough for allowing me to sing one of the greatest roles in all opera. I hope I was able to bring something new and unique to that multi-faceted character.
Beaune, France
I have sung at numerous other festivals throughout the world, some big and some small. Back in the 90s, I was lucky enough to sing a programme of Purcell and Pelham Humfrey anthems with the famous Collegium Vocale Gent, directed by Philippe Herreweghe, and we went to several delightful baroque festivals in Belgium and France. My favourite was in Beaune, the wonderful ancient town in the middle of the best wine region in the world, Burgundy. I had studied the late mediaeval flourishing of the Dukes of Burgundy while at St Andrews University, as part of my history course, and had visited with Fran many times as a tourist, but it was a special treat to spend time there as part of the Beaune Festival. Founded in 1982, the festival has earned a great reputation as a centre for baroque music, playing in the famous Hospices de Beaune, and in the 12th century Collégiale Notre- Dame de Beaune, where we performed. The weather was glorious, and strolling the ancient streets was a special delight. When not performing, I was able to sample a few of the region’s greatest wines, red from Beaune itself, Nuits-St-Georges and Gevrey-Chambertin to the north, and whites from Meursault and Puligny-Montrachet to the west. Burgundy is the epicentre of wine making for me, delicious pinot noir grapes for the red, and chardonnay for the whites, and, in those days, it was expensive but affordable. Sadly, nowadays, the world-wide expansion of markets, particularly the Chinese market, has sent prices rocketing sky-high, and mere mortals, even opera singers, are unable to afford anything but the generic regional wines. These are still spectacular, but the great wines are out of reach. This is particularly upsetting, as one knows that a lot of the buyers could be drinking grape juice for all they know or care. It’s now an investment tool.
Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
I’ll finish this look at festivals, for now at least, by taking you north and east of Beaune, to Halle, in Saxony-Anhalt, formerly East Germany. This medium-sized city is famous for being the birthplace of George Frederic Handel, one of the titans of music, and the festival connected to him was founded in 1922. Throughout the turbulent years of the 20th century, the Weimar republic, the Nazi era and the Communist German Democratic Republic, the Halle Festival managed to survive, not happening every year, but frequently enough to keep the flame alive. I first went there in 1996, for a new production of Handel’s opera ‘Tolomeo’, returning two years later for a restaging and a recording, and concert performances of ‘Judas Maccabeus’ and ‘Acis and Galatea’, and once more for a solo concert of Handel and Purcell arias, which I called ‘Wondrous Machine’. The wonderful historical coincidence of Handel being born in Halle and Bach dying in Leipzig, only 40 miles away, and yet never meeting, has always fascinated me. The two cities are as close to each other as Edinburgh and Glasgow, and, as in Scotland, they could be 40,000 miles apart. I have had the good fortune to work in both cities and have fond memories of both. In Leipzig, I sang Handel’s early opera ‘Aci, Galatea e Polifemo’ in an outdoor concert at a former mental asylum, Schőnefeld Palace, with the Chursächsische Capelle, Leipzig, and it was with this excellent baroque ensemble that I sang the ‘Wondrous Machine’ concert in Schloss Rheinsberg near Berlin and The Handel House in Halle.
I found Halle a very interesting festival, as it was only a few years after the Berlin Wall came down that I first went there. It was just emerging from the strange isolation of fifty years behind the Iron Curtain and was a mixture of post-industrial grime and quaint German kitsch. The Federal Republic almost literally threw money at the East, and the pace of change was staggering. By the time of my second visit in 1998, much of the city had been transformed, and outside in the country, the entire infrastructure was being replaced, roads, railways and communications. The standard of music-making was very high, with some of the finest Baroque singers, players and ensembles in the world participating. The ‘Tolomeo’, directed at the Halle Opera by Anthony Pilavachi (born in Cyprus, educated in France, an Irish citizen, Stage Management graduate from the Guildhall in London) and conducted by Howard Arman, was a great success, and the ‘Acis and Galatea’ with Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert was one of my finest concerts, fortunately recorded by Deutschland Radio, Berlin. The house in which Handel was born has been turned into a fantastic centre for his music, with courses all year, and a lovely concert hall and restaurant, where people can gather during the Festival. There is a wealth of fine baroque era buildings in Halle, which are all gradually being restored. While I was there, other concerts I attended were an outdoor performance of Carl Orff’s ‘Carmina Burana’ and a recital by the King’s Singers. Handel’s legacy is in safe hands.
It only remains for me to give a nod to the Holland Festival, the Aldeburgh Festival, the Glyndebourne Festival, the Beijing Festival, the Göttingen Handel Festival, the Bath Festival, the Spitalfields Festival, the Lucerne Festival and the Bregenz Festival, as a sample of the festivals I have been lucky enough to sing in. Summers would not be the same without festivals!
Cover Photo: Matthew Williams-Ellis
