5 days ago
Ryedale Festival review — extraordinary music in England's grandest homes
Running for 17 days across North Yorkshire from Skipton to Scarborough, the Ryedale Festival has expanded greatly in recent years. Architecturally, it encompasses some of the grandest stately homes in England as well as beautiful churches. Musically, it presents a healthy variety of styles and performers, with Eric Whitacre, Kate Rusby, Stephen Hough and Jess Gillam all appearing this week or next.
That nearly 12,000 tickets have been sold for this year's festival attests to the shrewd programming instincts of Christopher Glynn, the pianist who is Ryedale's artistic director.
And he doesn't play safe either. He was part of the ensemble for an extraordinary concert on Wednesday afternoon in Pickering Church. Mingling the music of Michael Tippett with that of Tippett's baroque hero, Henry Purcell, it ended with a rare performance of Tippett's disarmingly idiosyncratic 1958 chamber cantata Crown of the Year.
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Setting a celebratory text by Christopher Fry, it deploys a unique combination of instruments (including handbells and recorders) to create a web of plangent polyphony into which Tippett weaves numerous allusions to folk tunes.
Three singers (here the sopranos Claire Booth and Rowan Pierce and the countertenor Alexander Chance) deliver the text, often in close harmony. Some of the vocal writing is reminiscent of Tippett's opera The Midsummer Marriage, and there's that same feeling of slightly mystifying joyousness. One imagines listeners in the Fifties and Sixties greeting it with an approving murmur of 'far out, man'. I loved it, which perhaps dates me as well.
Pierce and Tippett's biographer Oliver Soden were the excellent speakers in Tippett's scarcely less quirky Words for Music Perhaps, reciting Yeats's image-infused poems between Tippett's equally characterful instrumental responses.
All the singers also ranged through a selection of Purcell songs (Pierce in particular finding the perfect blend of tonal beauty and incisive enunciation), and — the final atmospheric touch in an intriguing programme — two recorder players popped up around the church performing Tippett's strange but haunting Inventions between the bigger pieces.
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I wasn't so impressed by Wednesday evening's concert: the veteran Austrian ensemble Quatuor Mosaiques playing last quartets by Haydn and Schubert. The tone was wiry, the rapport imprecise, though there was vigour in the playing. But at least it was a chance to gawp at the solemn splendour of the drawing room at Duncombe Park, a stately home usually closed to the public.★★★★☆Festival continues to Jul 27,
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