United Kingdom Romsey Chamber Music Festival 2025 [1] – Schubert, Adès, Barber, Ravel, Bryars: String players of the Romsey Chamber Music Festival. Romsey Abbey, 31.5.2025. (CK)
Schubert – Erlkönig (arr. for strings)
Adès – O Albion (from Arcadiana)
Barber – Adagio for Strings
Ravel – La valse (arr. Tim Mulleman)
Gavin Bryars – Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet
Laura Rickard is calling this year’s Romsey Chamber Music Festival ‘Coda’: ‘we explore music from the brink of life’s end – compositions created amidst war, loss, and personal turmoil. It’s a celebration of music’s power to bring solace, offer hope, and convey the resilience of the human spirit.’ This might seem a brave and even risky strategy; but Laura has long since earned the loyalty, appreciation and trust of her audience. Those who well-nigh filled the nave of Romsey Abbey for this opening event were rewarded with a concert that movingly and meaningfully reflected both suffering and celebration, darkness and light.
The first half was carefully balanced between beauty and horror. I had not registered that Schubert wrote his famous song Erlkönig while still in his teens: this arrangement for strings packed a real punch from its seismic opening, the upsurge of the Elf-King’s motif on cellos and double bass biting into the texture, a sense of unease eating away at the music’s surface beauty: playing that generated considerable urgency, compressing the drama into a few highly-charged minutes.
The next piece gave an early indication of the stimulating range of music these festivals always provide (this year, from Hildegard of Bingen and Dowland to the present day). Having recently heard Sean Shibe play Thomas Adès’s Forgotten Dances at the Turner Sims, it was good to hear O Albion, from his early sequence Arcadiana, and to be reminded of the emphasis in Adès’s music on memory and loss: uncharacteristically, this brief and beautiful elegy has not the slightest hint of menace just around the corner. I cannot improve on Laura’s note: ‘It is less an evocation of a place than a memory – an England at once distant and deeply familiar, suspended in time, already half-lost.’
Like a river, the cello (Lydia Hillerudh) winds its slow, serious way beneath and among the other strings (Emma Roijackers and Luke Hsu, violins; Martin Moriarty, viola). A two-note falling figure comes again and again; it clearly says ‘Wagner’ to me, but I cannot place it: an appropriate response, perhaps, to the elusive spirit of Adès’s music – which has a way of burrowing into your consciousness, whether you want it to or not.
O Albion, Laura comments, inevitably recalls Elgar’s Nimrod – a link of sorts to the next piece, Barber’s Adagio (in his arrangement for string orchestra), which has a similar significance for Americans as an elegy for the fallen. For this, Laura’s core of players was joined by many others – pupils from local schools, conservatoire students and local amateur players – and what a sound they made! It filled the Abbey in waves; the anguished climax had a raw, naked intensity, seeming to hang over nothingness.
The first-half finale returned us to ruin and destruction: Ravel’s La valse, arranged by Tim Mulleman for String Nonet. Seriously? I remember a musician friend leafing through a pile of music in a second-hand shop and coming across an arrangement of the 1812 Overture for solo viola. On paper this seemed almost as incongruous: yet as wisps of waltz began to emerge over the soft pulsing of the double bass, doubts began to disappear.
Of course, they could only hint at a whole society dancing on the edge of a volcano: but they conjured up the music’s surreal, phantasmagorical quality brilliantly. In the Abbey’s acoustic space it sounded unearthly. At times we seemed within touching distance of Schoenbergian expressionist nightmare: strange, beautiful, unsettling. In place of the brutal cataclysm of Ravel’s orchestral ending, this Viennese waltz and all it stood for disappeared in a puff of smoke and a whiff of cordite. Superbly vivid and fiery playing from the quartet that performed the Adès, joined by Alice Ivy-Pemberton and Laura Rickard (violins), Kyungsik Shin (viola), Rainer Crosett (cello) and Stephen Conway (double bass).
Gavin Bryars’s Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet is a piece with profound resonance for me, but I know that it divides listeners, and no doubt will always do so. Rainer Crosett’s clear and sensitive introduction will have done much to prepare those who hadn’t heard it and didn’t know what to expect.
Musically it is simplicity itself. The note made reference to Steve Reich: and Bryars’s work accumulates, by gentler means, as intense an emotional freight as Reich’s more complex Different Trains. Perhaps the most moving thing about the performance was the way it was presented, resonating across time as well as space: the tramp’s voice (recorded over 50 years ago) filling the chancel and the nave, the musicians distributed down the side aisles, surrounding the voice with a respectful and beautiful nimbus of sound. It was, in truth, an immersive experience: the whole Abbey became an instrument.
The performance was very warmly received, though there were dissenting voices. An elderly gentleman sitting behind me was unimpressed: ‘Think what Bach could have done with that!’
A few weeks ago, on Good Friday, I had the great good fortune to be with a friend in Bach’s church, the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, listening to a performance of the St Matthew Passion. It was one of the great musical experiences of my life. At the end I didn’t want to leave, to quit the space that had held the sound, but to stay and let it resonate on and on in my memory. I had something of that feeling here.
Chris Kettle