Penarth chamber music festival review – 10th anniversary of a classy affair

In the decade since its inception, co-directors violinist David Adams and cellist Alice Neary have nurtured their Penarth Chamber music festival from its small beginnings to a jam-packed, ambitiously programmed five-day event. With a remarkable array of top instrumentalists, singers and contributors, this year’s 10th anniversary lineup showed just what a classy affair it’s become. What makes it special is the sense of connection and trust that’s developed between players and audience, allowing George Crumb’s extraordinary Black Angels quartet to be as enthusiastically received as Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge which preceded it.

For their gala celebration, the festival decamped from its base at the Pavilion on Penarth’s seashore to the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, where many of the players also teach. Lucy Wakeford was the harpist in Ravel’s septet, Introduction and Allegro, where quiet intimacy is balanced with the almost flamboyant virtuosity which was the work’s raison d’être, part of what was essentially a campaign to promote the new double action pedal harp by the makers Érard. Advertising was never more honourably conceived nor cast such a spell.

Huw Watkins’s second String Trio was given its premiere by Adams and Neary, together with the violist daughter Isobel Neary-Adams. Conceived in a span of seven movements, Watkins’s characteristic and artful interplay of knotty, tightly constructed material and lyrical lines imbued with a wistful melancholy, anchored in a web of solemn chords, was elegantly and convincingly articulated.

The highlight of this concert was music from Richard Strauss’s Capriccio, its opening string sextet and the Countess’s luminous final aria in the masterly chamber arrangement by David Matthews. Strauss’s swansong was an opera about opera, with two big questions: one debating the primacy of music or words, the second being the Countess’s dilemma, how to choose between two lovers, the composer and the poet. David Pountney’s new text created a dramatic bridge between the two extracts. Voicing the view of La Roche, Strauss’s director figure who has his own perceptions about priorities, was actor Samuel West, brilliantly mixing a philosophical vein with both an air of resignation and occasional braggadocio, going on to introduce soprano Katharine Dain – stepping in to replace an indisposed Rebecca Evans – and conductor Carlo Rizzi walking on stiffly in the role of the Major Domo. In this closing scene, the wonderful horn solo, played by Ben Goldscheider, set the tone for a deeply expressive performance. Dain sang radiantly, conveying the serious yet sensuous nature of the Countess, ultimately recognising that decisions were impossible and unnecessary.