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Music Concerts at St James' Church in 2007
Review from the Daily Telegraph 23rd May 2008
With its glowing, picture-postcard setting, Chipping
Campden in rural Gloucestershire is the perfect place for summer
music-making. Now in its seventh year, the town's festival has
definitively carved out a niche for itself, attracting top-flight
artists to play in the spacious and acoustically favourable St James's
Church. It has also secured a devoted audience, which packed the pews
and additional plastic seating for this programme centred on Handel
and Haydn, with the world premiere of a new piece for cello and
orchestra by Howard Goodall.
One of the festival's innovations this year is the formation of the
Chipping Campden Festival Academy Orchestra. Thomas Hull will be
familiar to many in the music business as a leading artists' manager,
but here he also showed his mettle as conductor of an ensemble that
was modestly sized but apt for the Baroque and Classical repertoire.
It was made up of professional players and gifted students, the
proportions apparently being half and half, and opened the concert
with a performance of Handel's Concerto Grosso Op 6 No 5 that had
stately grandeur in the overture and a crisp way of dealing with the
close-knit passagework of the faster movements.
The same measure of vitality and keen observance of scale underpinned
Haydn's C major Cello Concerto, in which Julian Lloyd Webber, though
invisible from my vantage point, established an aurally appreciable
bond with the orchestra, combining elegance and geniality with bracing
rhythms and buoyancy.
He was also soloist in And the Bridge is Love by Howard Goodall,
well-known for his TV, film and stage scores and now the country's
national ambassador for singing. Singing was at the heart of the
essentially lyrical And the Bridge is Love, not perhaps a work that is
going to stop the world in its tracks but one that is easy on the ear
in its wistfully elegiac way. Beginning in a shrouded atmosphere
vaguely reminiscent of the mood Rachmaninov evokes in The Isle of the
Dead, and with the harp as a prominent feature, it lightens its
spirits in the manner Elgar might have adopted, gently passing a motif
between cello and orchestra and creating an aura of mild
reflectiveness.
More robust material followed in the shape of Haydn's Symphony No 104,
given a performance that combined exhilarating drive with poignant
shaping in the slow movement, and identifying an orchestra that
deserves to become one of the festival's prized assets.
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