Spitalfields Music Summer Festival is the proper, if awkward, title of the annual event that has just happened for the 35th time, and is these days to be distinguished from both a briefer winter festival and a body fostering year-round music-educational activities. Spitalfields seems no longer to see itself essentially as a festival, but as a promoter and enabler whose main repository of ideas just happens to be the long-established summer event. That is a pity, for the Spitalfields festival always struck me as brilliantly autonomous, firmly rooted in a locality (the threshold of London’s East End) and a particular place: Hawksmoor’s Christ Church, perhaps the capital’s most arresting building, and for years the festival’s sole venue. The diversity of events — bold juxtapositions of very old music and very new — was unified by the church and its atmosphere (it was a semi-ruin, of course, for most of the first three decades), and also by the elegantly produced programme book.
Studded with art-college photographs that brought the multicultural environs into the church at charmingly unexpected angles, this could be relied on to give a scholarly context for every piece performed, a sort of Spitalfields imprimatur, and it has gone. As at the Bath festival, the organisers have seen paper and printing costs rise, and have settled for folded sheets — shades of Roneo days — containing biographical information and minimised programme notes, given out at each event. But maybe there are ideological reasons for not wishing to place the whole festival under the auspices of musicology. Certainly, there is an increased sense of separate constituencies at Spitalfields: baroque music at Christ Church, recitals at Shoreditch Church, avant-garde stuff at newly claimed venues such as the Rag Factory on Heneage Street, Whitechapel Gallery, or Flowers East. The festival isn’t the magic melting pot it used to be when everything took place at Christ Church.
It is nonetheless an invaluable venture in these hard financial times — still responding vibrantly to its locale, still filling Christ Church with the choral splendour it cries out for, and serving as the nearest approximation to a modern-music festival in London since the Almeida was quietly let go. It no longer has an artistic director as such — in the past, a composer has taken this role — but the Spitalfields executive director, Abigail Pogson, worked this year with two "associate artists": Harry Christophers and his choir, The Sixteen, and the composer-conductor James Weeks, who devised the contemporary events held in those three new venues.
I attended two of them. The long, airy, skylit, white-tiled room at the Rag Factory used for a portrait of the maverick British-born, Berlin-based composer and abstract painter Chris Newman (b 1958) was pleasant to sit in on a long June evening. Newman’s visual work, split-screen videos as well as minimally painted unstretched canvases, lay around, and he himself sang or bawled a selection of his droll songs, accompanied at the piano by Michael Finnissy. Several new pieces were premiered by the Kürbis Ensemble. Newman’s style is punk minimalism, faux-naïf rhythmic unisons his trademark, but his way of talking about his endeavours in the interview with Weeks that followed had an intellectual flamboyance that reminded me at once of WH Auden and Frankie Howerd.
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The portrait of the 85-year-old Italian composer Aldo Clementi given at Whitechapel Gallery by the Elision ensemble — it was a series of instrumental solos (guitar, cello, piano, trombone) with one trio — provided a hypnotic introduction to his technique of forming quasi-diatonic fragments into glinting mobiles. But the most substantial modern pieces I caught were part of the pianist William Howard’s late-evening recital at Shoreditch Church. Between passionate accounts of Mozart’s Adagio in B minor and Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, he played Martin Butler's Lisztianly titled Funérailles — a fiercely purposeful evocation of bell sounds — and premiered Piers Hellawell’s specially commissioned Piani, Latebre. Liszt was more properly invoked by the "layers and hiding places" of this title: they proved to be the basic constituents of keyboard virtuosity, the tremolo and the bravura octave-flourish looming large.
Shoreditch Church was an attractive, lyrically sombre location for this and other recitals (the violinist Thomas Gould and the cellist Philip Higham were superb in Kodaly’s Duo there), and recalled Christ Church before its sumptuous refurbishment. Here, it was as glorious as ever to hear such excellent bodies as the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, and the Academy of Ancient Music performing together under the direction of Timothy Brown (they completed a sequence of dirges and exequies — lustily sung — with a rare ode on the death of Purcell by Jeremiah Clarke); or the English Concert under Harry Bicket offering Purcell and Telemann and a couple of Bach cantatas that were graced by that fabulously accomplished soprano Elizabeth Watts.