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The Highgate Choral Society closed the festival at Queen Elizabeth Hall |
Camden classical music | Review of The Hampstead and Highgate Festival
REVIEW:HAMPSTEAD
AND HIGHGATE FESTIVAL
THE Hampstead andHighgate Festival’s 10th anniversary season ended on a quiet note with a programme of chamber orchestra pieces by English composers.
Danny Driver gave a vigorous account of the seldom-heard piano concerto by Howard Ferguson, and David Wilson-Johnson’s fine baritone was heard to advantage in Shakespeare song settings by Gerald Finzi.
Over the preceding 10 days we were treated to a wide variety of music, literature, walks and talks in the tradition that the Festival has now established.
Highlights included a superb recital by Jennifer Bate on the fine organ at St Michael’s Church, Highgate – there is nothing quite like the sonorous waves of sound of one of these instruments in the accoustic of a church – and the celebrity recital at St John’s in Hampstead with Stephen Kovacevich and Sara Trickey, where a packed audience enjoyed brilliant performances of Mozart, Schubert, Cesar Franck and local composer David Matthews.
Other new works in the festival by composers with local connections included a welcome commission from Adam Gorb, Serenade for Spring, played at the opening concert, which was devoted to fund-raising for Hampstead’s Marie Curie Hospice.
There was also a performance of Joseph Horovitz’s String Quartet No5 – Horovitz lived in Hampstead in the 1940s – at a splendid concert at Christchurch given by the Carducci Quartet.
Also at Christchurch, audiences heard festival favourite, cellist Gemma Rosefield, in an intriguing programme of pieces with clarinettist Catriona Scott and pianist Michael Dussek. It has been rewarding to follow Rosefield’s career at the festival as she has blossomed into one of the country’s finest young cellists.
The festival continued its expansion into opera with a new work by the young British composer Thomas Hyde, chronicling the rise and fall of Stephen Ward, superbly sung by baritone Andrew Slater. And the audience was treated to cabaret songs by Kurt Weill with mezzo-soprano Yvonne Fontane, which opened the evening.
Piers Plowright offered a fascinatingly varied Literary Series which included the chance to hear popular Camden councillor Flick Rea, in her former guise of professional actress in a programme of prose and poetry at Burgh House.
Other intriguing events were the composer David Matthews talking at the Tavistock Centre about the unconscious role of dreams in the composition of music; a celebration of Messiaen with music, film and conversation at the Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution; and Poetry at the Movies – a collaboration between Keats House and the Everyman cinema.
The weather was kind to the City this year for their jamboree at the Parliament Hill Bandstand where the Blues Boys played to a huge crowd in glorious sunshine.
Lauderdale House contributed attractive children’s programmes (see review) and also poetry readings, jazz and cabaret.
All in all a splendid feast presided over by the genial personality of artistic director, George Vass. The festival goes from strength to strength.
Geoffrey Sawyer
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