Long to rain over us: that’s what the wag said. But Jubilee downpours on Sunday couldn’t halt the English Music Festival, ensconced for the sixth year in cosy Dorchester-on-Thames. Wet bunting clung to the village’s buildings, while the evening concert waved its own flag for another monarch, King Arthur. Each piece in the Orchestra of St Paul’s unusual concert conjured up the Arthurian legend, though only in musical snippets, some just two seconds long.
Everything here, by Britain’s A-team of Elgar, Britten, and Purcell, was sourced from incidental music to dramatic entertainments. That was perilous. In King Arthur, Purcell wrote the most winning tunes. But Ben Palmer’s 18 selections, parcelled out over half an hour, proved difficult to digest, even with the bouncing clarity of his Orchestra of St Paul’s. This is an outfit determined to banish the throb of vibrato, no matter what era the music comes from.
For Purcell, clean and athletic, the lack of vibrato was fine. It also left no scars on the pocket Britten selection from a radio adaptation of T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone: youthful music, economical and flamboyant, brilliantly scored for winds, brass, percussion and harp, and a joy to hear. But Elgar’s long-forgotten score for Laurence Binyon’s 1923 verse play, Arthur? Oh, no. Stripped of romantic wobble, the strings’ playing may have been “pure”, but it was also desiccated, disembodied, hardly fit for the composer’s noble utterances and melancholic moods.
Two of the best cues proved familiar from Anthony Payne’s elaboration of the Third Symphony’s sketches. The rest, for the modern listener, was virgin territory: damp swooning sighs for Lancelot and Guinevere; musical sneers for, Mordred, the villain; repeated trumpet calls; brittle battle music. Definitely an interesting assemblage, though Elgar’s pit-orchestra scoring lacked Britten’s sparkle.
And once again the clock was against us. Palmer’s painstakingly researched presentation lasted a testing 55 minutes: too long for total comfort, even with Robert Hardy’s sonorous voice and green velvet jacket guiding us through the content of Binyon’s play. Still, the flag was waved. We felt patriotic. And we had our umbrellas.
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Concert supported by the Britten-Pears Foundation and the Elgar Society