Godchildren

Caroline and I have between us collected quite a gaggle of Godchildren. It's nice when we have visits from them. Last week, Caroline's Godson and his newish wife came to stay: yesterday, my violinist Goddaughter arrived for the night, our reason for booking tickets for the concert I mentioned. She's been at another this morning, before joining us for lunch in the garden afterwards.

A great pleasure, but I was sad to reflect on how small a part I had had in her musical flowering: yesterday was the first time I had ever taken her along to a concert.

Dropping off at the Pump Room, I saw Festival Director Meurig Bowen, who handed me a copy of his 70th Anniversary Festival book: it's a beautifully put together assembly of all the programme covers over the years - plus a few photographs at the end (two by me).

Cheltenham Music Festival - day 3

Festival Director, Meurig Bowen, posing for this photograph at the end of the interval in tonight's rather splendid Town Hall concert, said, "I bet it'll be up on your blog within half an hour!" Well, it's been a little longer...

That's because we've only just returned from a second event this evening. A silent film may seem an odd choice for a music festival, but this showing of the 1923 Salomé (with its lavish Beardsley-based costumes) was something special. You could sense it upon entering the Parabola, the screen flanked by two scaffolding towers, giving platforms for four percussionists: they played throughout, the score (including a vocal tape) composed by Charlie Barber.

The story line takes little time to relate, but every twist of the plot was here played out in ultra slow motion, like a Noh play almost. Without music it could have been risible, and perhaps even with a conventional piano accompaniment. But the tension created by the quartet of musicians, and clever lighting changes, made it a gripping 70-odd minutes. There were some astonishing performances in the film itself, not just from Alla Nazimova in the title part. I had vowed never to see Salomé performed again after the last time I went to the Strauss version (at ENO), but am now glad that I'd forgotten this when booking the tickets for this evening!

Earlier, I'd been apprehensive about paying £35 for a bench seat to hear a bunch of young amateurs from Singapore tackling a programme that included Delius and Holst, hardly my favourite composers. But my ear warmed to the sound of the Orchestra of the Music Makers, and Holst's Oriental Suite was a genuine surprise - a pleasure to hear.

Cheltenham Music Festival 2010

Christopher Cook, our Music Festival Chairman, welcomed us to the elegant surroundings of the former Daffodil Cinema this evening for the launch of next year's programme. But there were no moving pictures alas.

Instead, Festival Director Meurig Bowen gave us a quiz. Which is the odd one out of the four composers whose anniversaries will be celebrated next year, Schumann, Wolf, Gesualdo or Chopin? I said Chopin, because all the others wrote music for the voice. He said Chopin too - but for a non-musical reason: he was the only one who was not "odd". (Well "mad" was the word he used actually.)

The mooted programme comes across as excitingly varied - which is what Meurig has led us to expect. Nothing stereotyped here! Let's hope those with deeper pockets than me will ante up what is needed in the way of sponsorship, as the economic outlook is bound to cast doubt on the level of box office takings.

But Meurig left the best news of all to a private aside to me after his speech: for the first year in decades, we shall be able to walk out of the South doors of the Pittville Pump Room and be able to admire the gracious prospect of the Park - rather than the ugly profile of the catering marquee. Three cheers for that! It looks like the successful end of a very long campaign that I (along with a few others) have been waging!

Brendel in tandem

Richard Stokes, Alfred Brendel's interlocutor on the stage of Cheltenham's Everyman Theatre last evening, and the celebrated, recently-retired pianist gave us full value for money. The Everyman is used during the Music Festival, of course, but Brendel, a frequent July visitor to Cheltenham during the greater part of his playing career, will probably never have graced its stage before last night's Festival of Literature event.

We were as surprised as the audience at the first performance of Beethoven's G Major piano concerto must have been, by Brendel starting by introducing his interviewer: a very civilised idea, I thought, and one which could well be replicated for other events.

The two were obviously good friends, Professor Stokes being able to bring out twin aspects of his subject, his high seriousness and his impish, almost schoolboy humour. As Brendel said, wit and profundity are not mutually exclusive. In some works, Beethoven Op 31 no 1 was an example he gave, when a pianist hasn't made an audience laugh, he should become an organist.

As an illustration that a musician needs to sing and speak in tandem, we were treated to a story passed down by the late Sándor Végh: as a young violinist, he was playing for Chaliapin. "You can sing well on the violin, but you don't speak enough," the Russian bass advised. Later, Végh said he learnt the "speaking" from Casals.

Last night, the pair were introduced by current Festival Director, Meurig Bowen (seen here at the outset - I wasn't allowed to take photographs later on). I was proud to see my 1976 photograph of Alfred and Adrian Brendel, with Imogen Cooper plus Greenway cat, flashed up on the big screen.

Festival finale

Although the Cheltenham Music Festival doesn't end till tomorrow night, I've been to my last event now - a performance by the Australian String Quartet this morning: they put across their compatriot, Peter Sculthorpe's Quartet no 8 well - an interesting piece - but overall did not appear quite to be in the medal category from where I was sitting. The competition has however been fierce in Cheltenham, these last 14 days. Perhaps they were a bit handicapped by playing with a guest cellist.

Last night there were a couple of hiccoughs at the end of Christianne Stotijn's recital, with Julius Drake, but overall that was definitely a medal performance: this 31-year-old mezzo certainly deserves to be going places: the opera stage, I'd hope, with a voice so full of drama and power to colour the phrases. "Das Mädchen fing zu weinen an," she sang in Mahler's celebrated Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen - and we could have wept too I guess, at that and also at other moments during the evening. Great stuff, and great too to be reminded of how difficult it is to sustain a recital of this intensity by the young singer's reluctantly-admitted frailty.

So, a big thank you to Meurig Bowen and to all those who have been responsible for providing us with such a musical feast during this year's Festival!

The art of the quartet

Cheltenham Music Festival is certainly celebrating quartets this year: eight ensembles from round the world are playing for us, and superannuated instruments that have no doubt made up string quartets in the past have been painted for a special exhibition - most of it to be seen in the Summerfield Gallery, part of the University of Gloucestershire's Pittville Campus in Albert Road - round the corner from the Pump Room where the musicians perform.

The brainchild of Festival Director Meurig Bowen, the decorated fiddles and cellos make an appropriate accompaniment for the hilarious Hoffnung cartoons, which form the main show in the Gallery. Some surprising artists have taken up the challenge, including our local MP, Martin Horwood. My illustration shows Bob Devereux's violin on the left, Peter Granville-Edmunds's next to it (his illustration compares the wrecked instrument with a bombed out facade in I think Dresden), and then Mila Judge-Furstova's splendidly adorned cello - even painted on the inside.

But Meurig has run into some flak from the The Strad - see his blog. An interesting question, whether or not painted violins are art! They will be auctioned for charity next year - which doesn't necessarily make them art of course. I would never buy one myself, but they are fun to see exhibited, especally alongside many hundreds of painted violin cutouts, on show in the centre of town in various locations - part of another of the Festival's enterprising education projects.

Yesterday Quatuor Diotima gave the UK premiere of Matthias Pintscher's Study IV for Treatise on the Veil, the most curious work I have heard for a long while: not a single note of music as we know it! In the composer's programme note, he writes intriguingly: "I often find myself wishing that I was able to draw directly onto the sound of the instruments like a painter."

Out of order at the Festival

I've been reading Pope Benedict's new "social" encyclical - rather appropriate given that today is the feast of St Benedict. "It is good for people to realise," he writes, "that purchasing is always a moral - and not simply economic - act." Well, I can't claim any very high-minded motive for declining to purchase a £9 Music Festival programme (or even the £1 throw-away sheets) when I've attended this Festival's concerts. I came to realise at a certain stage a few years ago that the house - or rather the attic - was already too full of old concert and theatre programmes, and that I just had to stop buying them. Anyway the Festival provides a perfectly adequate advance booking brochure, setting out what we are to hear.

Perfectly adequate? Yes, for the most part, but this week there have been two irritating occasions when the order of the pieces performed has not been as set out in the advance brochure - and I and those others in the same boat were not given prior notice of this. While most of those of us left in the dark could probably tell after the first couple of bars that it was Beethoven not Shostakovich that the Borodin Quartet were playing in the middle of their recital programme, it was not at all obvious yesterday evening that Steven Isserlis and Connie Shih were launching into Schumann instead of Mendelssohn after their opener. So, a little more consideration please, Meurig "Hedgehog" Bowen, if the order is to be changed in future - particularly as you were up there on the stage, chatting away to us anyway before the concert, with your roving mike.

Having got that off my chest, I will say immediately that there was absolutely nothing out of order about the playing last night. It was a delight to hear two performers so much in sympathy with one another, and with a passionate shared commitment to the work of those two composers. OK, the "new" variations spurieuses - Thomas Ades's description, we were told - by Mendelssohn were perhaps a bit boring; but the second half of the recital took fire in no uncertain terms. This, anyway, seemed to be the post-performance consensus over supper - one of those present being particularly hungry having (aged 75) bicycled 12 or so miles to the concert.

Meta4 (pictured here before their rushed exit to catch their flights home to Helsinki) and the dynamic Ingrid Fliter likewise took fire yesterday morning, in the same hall, playing more Schumann - his great Piano Quintet: why is it so much less celebrated than Schubert's Trout? Perhaps because it doesn't have a nickname.

Before their interval, Meta4 had - with all the fearlessness of youth - launched into Beethoven Op 130, with the Grosse Fuge thrown in. We were in Cornwall last week, and I marvelled at the beauty of the waves, for surfing; but also at how perilous was the undertow. I was reminded of this during parts of that great fuge, where the playing rolls along, but can so easily come adrift: happily the quartet, 3/4 of whom played standing up (on their surfboards), all ended together eventually. A brave performance.

The 65th Cheltenham Festival of Music

John Manduell - who ran our music festival for many years - used to contact local Air Force bases in advance, to ensure there would be no low-flying planes to provide unwelcome obbligati during concerts. His meticulous successor, Meurig Bowen, was confronted by a different source of extraneous sound during tonight's Smith Quartet recital: a firework display - marking end of term festivities at Cheltenham Ladies' College, one gathers. The College, not content with adding to the warming of the planet and burning money, marred our enjoyment of Philip Glass's concentrated 5th Quartet. (Their display would have been better timed for rather earlier in the evening when Handel's Royal Fireworks music was performed in the same building.)

This apart, the Smith Quartet galvanised the audience with exhilarating renderings of George Crumb's Black Angels and Steve Reich's Different Trains. A pity we couldn't hear them in a better space, though: the Pillar Room's sightlines are appalling; the acoustic lacks resonance and we all sweltered in the heat.

Earlier, I had visited Pittville and glimpsed the Festival's Fiesta in the Park: as you can see from my photograph, a good time was being had by all - or all who turned out: the Park deserved to be packed on a sunny Saturday afternoon, given the effort the organisers had put into the occasion. (I hope to write more about what's on display at Pittville shortly.)