O Albion, the 12th January chamber-music festival at the Royal Northern College, in Manchester, was devoted to British work ranging back to Handel and Purcell, but took its title from a movement in a recent addition to the string-quartet repertory, Thomas Adès's Arcadiana. Versions of Arcady is, of course, a rubric under which much British music could be discussed; and it was an interesting gesture to take the Adès as a starting point, since, in its urbane way, it seems to toy with the pastoral tradition before happily letting the whole nostalgic thing evaporate.
It was performed by the young, impressive Navarra Quartet, whose leader took time to explain each of the seven stylised movements, implying that the piece was a special case, testing not only for players, but for the audience. And though it poses no difficulty of a conventionally avant-garde variety, and has an alluring, often tonal surface, its sensibility must indeed make demands on a listener unused to music every note of which, and even every bar line, is ironic. To follow the work with Vaughan Williams's ardent, utterly direct Housman song cycle On Wenlock Edge, for which the quartet was joined by the tenor Matthew Moss and the pianist Jeremy Young (the festival's director), was like following an act of a Wilde play with an act by Wesker.
This was the centrepiece of the long weekend, which went more or less to plan despite the arctic freeze. The faithful audience was only slightly depleted, and clearly of the collective mind that nothing should stand in the way of chamber music. It's an attitude enshrined by the work of WW Cobbett (1847-1937), whose devotion was such that, as Geoff Thomason's programme essay recounted, he not only produced Cobbett's Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music, but established a journal of chamber music, a free library of it and, most significantly, the Cobbett Prize for a work in the spirit of Elizabethan and Jacobean consort phantasies.
Numerous composers were spurred on by this, among them Vaughan Williams and Britten. On the programme by Norway's Vertavo Quartet (with the violist Simon Rowland-Jones) was VW's rhapsodic Phantasy for String Quintet; and the RNCM's Eblana String Trio's afternoon concert included a stylish account, with the oboist David Curington, of Britten's early Phantasy Quartet, a truer reflection of the single-span concept of the historical originals than the VW. Phantasies by Bridge, Ireland and Rubbra were offered, and there was a lecture by Paul Spicer making it central to a consideration of the development of an English voice in early-20th-century chamber music.
His audio illustrations of rarities by Herbert Howells, George Dyson and others afforded a pleasant pastoral journey. But the question of a distinctive national voice is a matter of individual, self-defining contributions of genius, rather than conformity to notions of style and character, as was abundantly demonstrated by the Endellion Quartet's towering performances, in the final concert, of the solitary Elgar quartet: nearer, one could believe from this account, to the tempestuous complexity of Schoenberg than anything of a native pastoral hue.
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The Navarra Quartet's rendering of Britten's Quartet No 2 left me similarly amazed at an annexation of continental territory. The work's uncanny extensions of quartet texture rival Bartok's, and occasionally evoke them, but they also seem as Brittenish (and British) as possible. The Navarras had the measure of this strenuous music, while the
Vertavos came close to a successful unscrambling of another, quite different British masterpiece, Tippett's Quartet No 3. It was a far cry from Bridge's Three Idylls, this programme's pastoral-blustery opener, to the neo-Beethovenian intransigence of Tippett's five-movement, relentlessly fugal structure. Nothing of overt "Englishry" here, yet the syncopated rhythms are indebted to the English madrigalists, and the glistening high lyric lines of the two slow movements kin to the folkish mysticism of VW.
O Albion was a thorough stimulus in pointing out such connections. Its focus was predominantly on music between Elgar and the second world war, and it would have been good to hear from later figures - Alexander Goehr, for example, who studied in Manchester. Still, the weekend was undoubtedly a winter feast.