Hay-on-Wye is so famous for shops that sell books and for a festival which platforms their authors, that it may come as a surprise (a relief, even) to discover that it also has a music festival.
It’s admittedly a modest affair, chamber music only, no tents or signings, no desperate scurrying from quartet to quartet through mud or dust. It’s very much a local festival, the pinnacle, so to speak, of a hyper-active local music society.
But provincial it is not. Its director, Mick Peake, as well as being a distinguished oncologist, is a board member (ex-chairman) of the Huddersfield Festival, and has not been afraid to ply his Hay subscribers with new music alongside the staple classics. There have recently been Ligeti and Schoenberg events, visits by Michael Finnissy, Judith Weir, Howard Skempton, inter alia. This past weekend Nigel Osborne appeared with a new string quartet, sandwiched humbly (Osborne’s word) between Mozart and late Beethoven, and given its first performance in the festival’s closing concert in the parish church of St Mary by the Fitzwilliam Quartet.
There was a medical connection here as well. Osborne, while composition professor at Edinburgh University, spent a lot of his time as a music therapist with traumatised children in Sarajevo; now retired from academe, he has recently been working in similar fashion with children (pictured left) and soldiers in Ukraine. His quartet, somewhat oddly titled Birnam Wood, is a kind of compilation of and reflection on songs actually composed by Ukrainian soldiers. It moves rather touchingly backwards and forwards between the songs themselves, simply harmonised, and Osborne’s more sophisticated, exquisitely worked embroideries. As it stands it hardly amounts to a finished work (“almost a piece,” he admitted privately), but is rather a kind of diary “of a musical therapeutic process.” Perhaps something bigger and more complete will emerge. But for now Osborne is off back to the front line.
Meanwhile the Fitzwilliams crowned their programme with the greatest of all essays in music therapy, Beethoven’s late A minor Quartet, op.132, with its central “Heilige Dankgesang” - its thanksgiving to God from a convalescent - a movement that the composer’s biographer Maynard Solomon called “an implicit agency of healing” (Beethoven was recovering from a severe intestinal inflammation).
It was a performance that took time to generate the tension that culminates in that long, sometimes nearly static central movement. But at that point it clicked. Balance, which had been variable in the first movement, seemed to fall into place, the sound became serene, and these fine players achieved that hardest of feats, to sustain the almost motionless coda, then relax into the finale without losing the sense of eternity.
Mozart’s G Major Quartet, K. 387, which opened the programme, was meant perhaps as a challenge to the bugs and traumas that lurked thereafter. A less sickly piece would be hard to imagine, but as therapy this music could surely cure practically anything, at least in the mental sphere. The Fitzwilliams dispatched it with a sort of easy brilliance, but with plenty of emphasis on Mozart’s eccentric dynamic markings in the minuet and slow movement, and a suitably light touch on the fugal intricacies of the finale.
