European
Union Chamber Orchestra
Malvern
College ****
Thirty-five years after founding the Autumn in Malvern
Festival, Peter Smith is finally retiring as Artistic Director. He has brought
so many illustrious performers, composers, lecturers to the town, as well as
promoting visual arts exhibitions, and though the running of the festival is
now in the safe hands of Malvern Theatres, Peter’s devoted input will prove a
difficult act to follow.
Over recent years the European Union Chamber Orchestra have
been popular visitors, and here they were the performers in Peter’s last
orchestral programme. These twelve string-players play standing up (cellos
necessarily excepted), directed with perhaps undue distracting body-language by
concertmaster Hans-Peter Hoffman, and they have an energetic bowing style and
subtle empathy among each other.
The programme began brilliantly, with yet another of Peter’s
rewarding musicological explorations, Britten’s devising of six British composers
each to contribute one variation on an Elizabethan theme to Sellenger’s Round,
premiered at the Aldeburgh Festival shortly after the Coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II. Four of these names have remained in the pantheon: Michael Tippett,
whose ground-based Lament was surely practice for his wonderful Fantasia Concertante
on a Theme of Corelli; Lennox Berkeley and Britten, typically workmanlike: and
Walton, whose fugal finale, with its nods to Britten’s Hymn to St Cecilia,
brought the compilation to a grand peroration. The other two, Arthur Oldham and
Humphrey Searle, seem to have disappeared.
After this enlightening offering. Mendelssohn’s D minor
Violin Concerto enlightened for all the wrong reasons. This proved tedious, a
work taxing to the patience, not least in the interminable opening movement
leaning heavily on a Bachian unison motif which kept returning as an unwelcome
guest. The composer was only 13 when he produced this, but what a gulf between
the few years later when his life-enhancing Octet and Midsummer Night’s Dream
Overture appeared. Hofmann and the EUCO did their best for this sorry
museum-piece.
Another juvenile superstar, Mozart, followed, with the D
major Divertimento K136, entertaining enough, but did we really need every
dogged repeat in this admittedly spirited performance?
Then came the greatest joy of the afternoon, Holst’s modest
little Brook Green Suite, its gossamer tapestry sensitively delivered by
Hofmann’s EUCO.
Bartok;s Romanian Dances made a colourful finale, strongly rhythmic,
exhilarating in the seamless straight-on links between each movement, and a wonderful
conclusion to Peter Smith’s final orchestral concert.
Malvern will never see his like again.
Christopher Morley