United Kingdom Romsey Chamber Music Festival 2025 [2] – Various: Romsey Abbey, St Leonard’s Church, Sherfield English, Romsey URC Church, 3-5.6.2025. (CK)
Paganini – 24 Caprices (Luke Hsu [violin])
Recently a friend of mine bagged his final Munro, completing the ascent of all 282 mountains in Scotland over 3000 feet. Fitting it all into a busy life, it has taken him 45 years and 2 days. Compress all that into a single evening, and you have some idea of Luke Hsu’s achievement in performing all 24 of Paganini’s Caprices at the Romsey Chamber Music Festival.
I am not equating these feats; nor, of course, was Luke’s achieved in a single evening. In an extended, revealing and ultimately rather moving essay in the Festival Programme, Luke explains how his own Paganini journey since boyhood has been a long, exacting and essentially private one: ‘The Caprices became a major force in keeping me motivated amidst a dark and confusing time … (They) were my consolation throughout the pandemic, and they represent my private sphere.’ Brave, then, to step out of the shadows and play them for an audience: and to play them all from memory – which sounds to me as daunting as tackling the Black Cuillin in fog without a map or compass – was eloquent proof of how completely they have become part of him.
Luke’s excellent notes meant that non-musicians like me could keep abreast of what was happening in each Caprice. Much of it left me open-mouthed, though it was much more than a technical display: Luke seemed able to inhabit each Caprice personally, his sensitive playing revealing pools of cantabile beauty amidst the whitewater thrills. There were passages of real delicacy: the minor-key melody of No.6 haunted by trills like the beating of birds’ wings, turning quietly to the major at the very last moment. There were charmingly witty imitations of other instruments – horns, flutes, bagpipes; there were passages demanding quicksilver agility, Luke’s left hand racing up and down the fingerboard like a hyperactive spider. The final, summatory Caprice was simply phenomenal, with pizzicatos (to isolate a single detail) like hail hitting a windscreen.
At the end we all rose to him in the longest and loudest ovation I can remember. We even had two encores; the first, very fittingly, brought Laura Rickard on the stage with him for one of eight Caprices for two violins by Henryk Wieniawski. What can I say? It was one of that handful of concert experiences which, years later, can make one smile and think ‘I was there’.
Bridge – Cello Sonata (Lydia Hillerudh [cello], Ziteng Fan [piano])
Rebecca Clarke – Morpheus (Kyungsik Shin [viola], Ziteng Fan [piano])
Debussy – Violin Sonata (Emma Roijackers [violin], Ziteng Fan [piano])
Stunning as Luke’s achievement was, it did not obliterate the memory of the two preceding Festival events: for the first of them we were back in Romsey Abbey for a concert slotted neatly into the Abbey’s Tuesday lunchtime series. It was very good to see Ziteng Fan, who missed last year’s festival through illness, back as the busy pianist in all three items.
She was with Lydia Hillerudh for Frank Bridge’s Cello Sonata, which took him most of the First World War to write: its two movements give an indication of the change in his style, partly because of the influence of Berg, but reflecting also his reaction, as a pacifist, to the wholesale slaughter of the War. The opening Allegro, Lydia’s cello singing freely over Ziteng’s rippling pianism, reached a Romantic fullness that brought Rachmaninov to mind, sinking to an equipoise between serenity and sorrow before taking wing again. After a ruminative opening on piano the Adagio seems shadowed by pain, the cello elegiac, the piano’s discourse coloured by quiet dissonances. The music grows in intensity, breaking off without a sense of completion: nothing has been solved. Worth remembering that when Bridge composed Oration, his large-scale response to the horrors of war, he again turned to the cello (with orchestra this time).
Rebecca Clarke is one of those composers whose music I would probably never hear if it were not for the Romsey Chamber Music Festival. Morpheus proved to be considerably more than an interlude between two major works, Kyungsik Shin’s viola line seeming to float and drift above Ziteng’s rather exotic piano. The music is poised pleasingly between English Pastoral and Impressionism; I hope to hear it again.
After these intimations of Impressionism, the thing itself in the form of Debussy’s last completed work, his Sonata for Violin and Piano. As always, Emma Roijackers commanded our attention with the personality and variety of her playing, throwing out streamers of sound. The First World War was raging, and Debussy himself was mortally ill: though the Sonata’s three short movements are inevitably touched by this, the overall impression is of energy and even playfulness – as if the composer has decided not to compose a valediction, but simply to remain himself to the end.
Edmund Finnis – Hymn (after Byrd)
Schubert – String quartet in D minor, Death and the Maiden
(Alice Ivy-Pemberton, Laura Rickard [violins], Kyungsik Shin [viola], Rainer Crosett [cello])
Wednesday evening’s performance of Schubert’s Quartet Death and the Maiden, in the beautiful Church of St. Leonard in Sherfield English, was, without question, the finest quartet performance I have ever heard. It was preceded by Edmund Finnis’s gravely beautiful Hymn (after Byrd), played without vibrato like a viol consort. The music seemed to be finding its way through darkness towards Byrd’s setting of an ancient prayer for light, coming to rest on the note which launches Schubert’s quartet – into which we were plunged without time to draw breath.
Such dramatic, incisive playing! And such unanimity and hair-trigger understanding between the four players! As the second movement’s variations unfolded, I was reminded that the sadness and tragedy in Schubert’s music is sometimes so beautiful that we can be lulled into finding consolation where there is only pain: that wasn’t possible here. The opening of the Scherzo had me wondering whether Wagner remembered this music in the hammering of Nibelung anvils in Das Rheingold. The finale, taken at breakneck speed, became a ride to the abyss, the lighter music expressing life’s fragility in the face of death, the affirmation of the chorale-like theme insistently undercut by harsh minor-key strokes. It was relentless, and the players’ articulation at such speed was almost unbelievable. The reception was nothing short of ecstatic.
Chris Kettle