Cheltenham Music Festival closes with an uproarious raspberry from Malcolm Arnold

Telegraph

2 days ago

Eighty years old this year, the Cheltenham Music Festival decided to salute its own illustrious past in a closing concert from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales that was celebratory, nostalgic and madly rumbustious, all at once.
There was plenty to celebrate, not least the fact that the Cheltenham Music Festival must be the only one in Britain if not the world to give birth to its own musical genre. After it was founded in 1945 the Festival became an indefatigable commissioner of new works, many of which were symphonies of a challenging, modernist kind. Cheltenham was determined to put itself on the map culturally, and nurturing an ever-growing body of 'Cheltenham Symphonies' as they became known was a very good way to do it.
Alas most of them have not survived the test of time. But as last night's performance of Malcolm Arnold 's Fifth Symphony proved, the test of time isn't always fair. In 1961 when this symphony was premiered the fashion was for deeply serious modernist symphonies, and Arnold's symphony was simply too badly behaved. It's got tunes, for one thing – really good ones, that sound like a cross between Mahler and Rachmaninov with a bit of 'filmic' sentimentality thrown in. There's also what sounds like a car-chase from an Ealing comedy, and a madly cheerful menagerie of military pipes, all mixed up with aggressively modernist dissonance, which is surely Arnold blowing a raspberry at the po-faced 1961 musical establishment.
All this was led with appropriate gleeful relish by conductor Gergely Maduras, and played with uproarious energy by BBC NOW. It was madly entertaining, but the most shocking thing was the desolate ending, which gave a sense of existential dread lurking behind the motley parade of different moods.
Alongside this 64-year-old festival commission was a brand-new one, SoundingsDancesEchoes, a Fanfare for Cheltenham by the young British composer Anna Semple. It began with faint percussive sounds like distant thunder which groped upwards and burgeoned first into notes and harmonies and then into glowing, wheeling brass chords. Just as it seemed the music was going to become properly celebratory it deflated and dissipated into stray sounds. Semple was clearly determined not to write a conventional fanfare, and the result certainly had a poetic suggestiveness. But like many 'atmospheric' pieces it was dogged by a lack of momentum.
There were two more salutes to Cheltenham Festival's past. The first of them was the Four Sea Interludes from Britten's Peter Grimes, conducted by the composer himself at the very first Cheltenham Festival. It's one of those pieces that's in danger of becoming worn smooth from over-familiarity, but here its wild, untamed quality came across vividly.
The other salute was Elgar's Enigma Variations, also played on that far-off day in 1945. Here the beefy vividness in the orchestral playing that worked so well for Arnold and Britten was a disadvantage. The performance seemed lacking in finesse and brass-heavy, though it was redeemed by some lovely solo playing, above all from the principal cellist and violist.