1 year
4 months ago
From Meurig Bowen
Music Festival Director
One of the many enjoyable and impressive aspects of the Budvar Cheltenham Jazz Festival, for me, was the Friday Night is Music Night performance in the Town Hall. Quite apart from some great music-making by the BBC Concert Orchestra, Guy Barker Big Band and soloists, I really enjoyed the story that was told about Duke Ellington’s friend and musical collaborator, pianist Billy Strayhorn. A superb script, expertly delivered by Clarke Peters and Michael Brandon, wove in and out of the music, and by the end of the evening we were all much the wiser about Strayhorn’s life, loves and musical legacy. (If you missed the performance, you can still catch it for a couple more days on the BBC Radio 2 website with Listen Again)
Such a satisfying combination of words and music wasn’t my first encounter with live musical biography last week — because two nights before, in Trafalgar Square’s church of St Martin in the Fields, I attended ‘Divine Music for Voices and Trumpets’. This was the only other outing this year of the celebratory Handel programme that we’re presenting in the Music Festival on Saturday 4 July in Cheltenham Town Hall.
Conductor Ben Hoffnung and baroque trumpeter David Blackadder have written an absorbing script that — like the Radio 2 Strayhorn narrative — weaves in and out of the musical sequence. The narrator is Handel himself — looking back on his life as an old man, reflecting on his German roots, his apprenticeship in Italy, and the high — and low-points of his decades living in London. Hoffnung and Blackadder’s script is informative without being too learned, it has humour and pathos, and it is nicely paced throughout the 100-or-so minutes of music.
And yes — then there’s the music — a deeply satisfying sequence of choral, orchestral and operatic Handel. Everything that Handel bequeathed us in his music is there — freshness of spirit, exquisite melodic line, emotional and spiritual depth, and all the rousing, uplifting feelgood of ceremonial pieces such as Zadok the Priest, the Fireworks Music and the Dettingen Te Deum.
Actor Alex Jennings played Handel in this London performance; in Cheltenham we have Harry Enfield as the great man. The soloists were the same — and I can confidently say you will not be disappointed in Cheltenham by soprano Ruby Hughes (who has just won the London Handel Singing Competition), counter-tenor Iestyn Davies and bass Neal Davies. As for the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment… the St Martin in the Fields performance featured eight baroque trumpets, and we were treated to a sound that was thrilling, majesterial and — dare I use this word in its literal, non-degraded way? — awesome. David Blackadder’s solo playing in pieces like The trumpet shall sound from Messiah was nothing short of masterly.
Eight trumpets in London. We’re getting SIXTEEN in Cheltenham. It may be the only chance in your life to hear so many baroque trumpets in one place at the same time: it’s a fairly specialist thing, being a baroque trumpeter (they don’t have any valves to help them, like modern trumpets — just fingerholes and some seriously in-shape lips) and they’re in as much demand around the musical world as good plumbers were before the U-bend-fixing cavalry arrived from Poland.
Tickets for our big Handel concert on Saturday 4 July are selling well. I’d put good money on it selling out well in advance — so this is my tip-off to you to buy sooner rather than later!
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We’ve tagged this post with Meurig Bowen, music on Thursday 7 May 2009.
