Born 67 years ago, the HSBC Cheltenham Music Festival keeps on trucking among the flowerbeds. New British symphonies of a conservative cast, once a speciality, have long given way to percussion spectaculars, the Swingle Singers, Norwegian delicacies, and all the important Bs: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, Plus another: Charlotte Bray. The 29-year-old British composer’s Replay was inspired, we were told, by “images of spherical trigonometry”. Not encouraging, I know: especially in a concert designed as part of the festival’s strand linking music to mathematics. But I heard no hypotenuses in Bray’s ten-minute dazzler for piano, violin, viola and cello. Instead, my ears were busy with interlocked yearning phrases or rhythmic patterns both stabbing and chunky — material presented, inspected, then reconfigured with a bright imagination and, even better, a keen urge to communicate.
It was all vivid and exhilarating, particularly in the hands of the Festival Academy Soloists, the group of professionals mentoring Cheltenham’s intake of talented music students from Britain and abroad. Beforehand, the pianist Huw Watkins and the string players Alexandra Wood, Clara Biss, Cian O’Duill and Robert Michael had their skills tested by Robert Saxton’s challenging and striking A Yardstick to the Stars, written in 1995 and not heard much since. Once again, trigonometry provided the composer’s spark; once again, dry calculations disappeared.
Saxton conjured the Ancient Greeks’ plotting of the planets through a four-movement dialogue between two parallel planes: the piano moving fast in a straight line; a string quartet, slower, more discursive, tracing a semicircle alongside. The farther Saxton’s game proceeded, the more involving it grew. As an hors d’oeuvre we had Patrick Brennan’s brief piano spin-off, Patterns in a Galactic Field, which was sparky, flighty, and reasonably tasty.
No trigonometry featured in Fauré’s late String Quintet No 2, wonderfully impassioned and lyrical, given a performance to match by the Soloists.
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