A HUGELY SUCCESSFUL FESTIVAL by Tony Stoller, Chair of Trustees
Our Festival, which is now in its 18th year, enjoyed a huge success over the four days at the beginning of May. A total of eight separate concerts, plus four linked events, played to near-capacity and highly appreciative audiences, who realised how incredibly fortunate the city is to host such high class performances by internationally renowned chamber musicians.
Appropriately, the Festival began with a Schools’ concert. Festival musicians had visited Stanmore Primary School to work with students there. On Friday morning, two school classes performed the wonderfully imaginative songs they had written just days before, to the great enjoyment of an audience in St Paul’s Church.
Education was one of the hallmarks of this year’s Festival, which also welcomed the Zenith Quartet of students from the Royal Academy of Music as its Emerging Quartet in Residence. They had excellent tutelage from the professional musicians and the opportunity to perform in concerts. Following the Schools’ concert on Friday, the Quartet played a most enjoyable musical set in the ARC for people from Winchester Go LD, the local charity for those with learning disabilities.
The Opening Concert on Friday afternoon in the usual venue of St Paul’s Church reflected the very real ambition and diversity of the Festival programme. Works by established composers, Brahms and Ravel, were performed alongside pieces by 20th century composers Pamela Harrison and George Crumb. The latter’s Voice of the Whale deployed three masked musicians playing music derived from the song of whales, followed by a Brahms String Quintet. All the pieces, performed to an exceptionally high standard, generated lively discussion at the Friends’ Reception which followed the concert.
A packed St Lawrence Church in the centre of Winchester was the venue for an atmospheric late-night concert on Friday evening. The sold-out audience was treated to a programme spanning the centuries from a sublime solo cello suite by Bach through to a contemporary piece written for string quartet by exciting New York-based contemporary composer, Inti Figgis-Vizueta. The following morning, an illuminating pre-concert talk considered Schoenberg’s importance to the development of classical music. That preceded a landmark concert on the theme of Vienna at the turn of the 19th century, featuring pivotal works by Mahler, Eisler, Beethoven, Schoenberg and Schubert. In almost complete contrast, the Saturday evening concert featured the folk band ZRI who brought the house down with their live music accompaniment to a screening of Charlie Chaplin’s silent comic film, The Adventurer.
Staying with the themes of accessibility and broad appeal, Sunday morning in The Nutshell began with an uproariously successful Family Concert on the theme of ‘animals’, which anticipated a performance of Saint-Saëns Carnival of the Animals on Monday morning. The Zenith Quartet then enjoyed a fascinating masterclass from violinist Lucy Gould.
Sunday evening comprised the Festival Gala Concert, once again this year in the Theatre Royal Winchester. It was a true gala, beginning with Holst’s St Paul’s Suite and offering a range of classical and contemporary works, concluding with Benjamin Britten’s Simple Symphony. Ailie Robertson’s Beannacht, composed in 2024 for viola-player Scott Dickinson, very much caught the audience’s imagination with his soulful sound amplified with echo effect and the atmospheric lighting, as did the UK première of a hugely exuberant Concertino for solo clarinet and strings, performed in dazzling style by Robert Plane.
The final Monday made a striking impression with the profoundly anti-war messages in the Shostakovich Quartet No 3 and the outpouring of romantic melodies in Rachmaninov’s Sonata for cello and piano, performed wonderfully by our artistic director, Kate Gould with her pianist colleague, Julian Milford.
Thanks must go to the warm and appreciative audiences. Being in the company of Schoenberg, Shostakovich and Charlie Chaplin has been intellectually stimulating but above all it has been great fun… What a wonderful way to spend the first four days of May.
Don’t forget to put the 2026 dates, 1 – 4 May, in your diaries and watch out for a date for out Autumn Concert soon. |
