Judith Weir, Bath Festival

There was also a somewhat noisy showing of (but no information about) the Weir film Armida and Other Stories. But the best part of the programme, apart from a couple of other short choral works which the choir managed with aplomb in the driest, most unhelpful acoustic imaginable, was Judith’s short conversation with the festival’s director, Joanna McGregor.  They talked only about background matters, about school and university and about how and where they work.  But since they are both practising musicians, this was good fly-on-the-wall stuff, and could profitably have been extended.

The morning concert in the Assembly Rooms had presented us with Weir’s music plain and without apology, revealing its community aspect as a direct offshoot of a creative inspiration whose folk derivations suggest a community music heard historically.  Her one-woman opera, King Harald’s Saga, for instance, came across as a kind of bardic comedy, in Elin Manahan Thomas’s stylish, quick-witted performance, while the more complex textures of  instrumental works like the Piano Quartet and, especially, Distance and Enchantment (finely played by the Lawson Trio with the violist Rebecca Jones) derive very obviously from certain types of group peasant singing, rather in the way that Bartók invented a complicated modernist language out of the strange folk singing he had discovered in the wilds of Hungary.

Weir’s music, it’s true, is mostly less forbidding, partly I imagine because her source music lacks the primitive edge of his.  Needless to say this is elective on her part.  These two quartets are brilliantly intricate and energetic, but they don’t cultivate the harshness of the bizarre scales and mistuned hurdy-gurdies Bartók so loved.  They might even acknowledge some distant affinity with the simple Welsh folksongs eloquently sung here by Elin Manahan Thomas, or with the Gaelic harp music of Catriona McKay, which doesn’t disguise its debt to the genteel nineteenth-century arrangements in which most of us first encountered what we thought of as folksong.

There was also a somewhat noisy showing of (but no information about) the Weir film Armida and Other Stories. But the best part of the programme, apart from a couple of other short choral works which the choir managed with aplomb in the driest, most unhelpful acoustic imaginable, was Judith’s short conversation with the festival’s director, Joanna McGregor.  They talked only about background matters, about school and university and about how and where they work.  But since they are both practising musicians, this was good fly-on-the-wall stuff, and could profitably have been extended.

The morning concert in the Assembly Rooms had presented us with Weir’s music plain and without apology, revealing its community aspect as a direct offshoot of a creative inspiration whose folk derivations suggest a community music heard historically.  Her one-woman opera, King Harald’s Saga, for instance, came across as a kind of bardic comedy, in Elin Manahan Thomas’s stylish, quick-witted performance, while the more complex textures of  instrumental works like the Piano Quartet and, especially, Distance and Enchantment (finely played by the Lawson Trio with the violist Rebecca Jones) derive very obviously from certain types of group peasant singing, rather in the way that Bartók invented a complicated modernist language out of the strange folk singing he had discovered in the wilds of Hungary.

Weir’s music, it’s true, is mostly less forbidding, partly I imagine because her source music lacks the primitive edge of his.  Needless to say this is elective on her part.  These two quartets are brilliantly intricate and energetic, but they don’t cultivate the harshness of the bizarre scales and mistuned hurdy-gurdies Bartók so loved.  They might even acknowledge some distant affinity with the simple Welsh folksongs eloquently sung here by Elin Manahan Thomas, or with the Gaelic harp music of Catriona McKay, which doesn’t disguise its debt to the genteel nineteenth-century arrangements in which most of us first encountered what we thought of as folksong.