Reviewed by: David Truslove
Published: June, 2025
The Romsey Chamber Music Festival goes from strength to strength, and this year’s events explored music belonging to endings, transformation and the force of the human spirit. From Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’ string quartet through to George Crumb’s Black Angels, Festival Director Laura Rickard, curated an enterprising programme with her group of conservatoire-trained musicians, each of these young professionals sharing duties as part of a collective.
Much credit must go to Rickard for the boldness of her vision, with many events impressing for their stylistic variety including the afternoon concert on Day 6 which drew together Beethoven, (Richard) Strauss, Romsey-born Martin Butler and contemporary composer Ollie Mustonen. His Soul Bird (2009) for piano or harpsichord draws inspiration from Finnish mythology. While its fluttering bird gestures and soulful rumination were tenderly caught by Ziteng Fan, she couldn’t hide its predominantly conservative idiom. Butler’s Five Vignettes for violin duo (commissioned jointly by Romsey Chamber Music Festival and Presteigne Festival) are, according to the composer, “sonic snapshots of an imagined journey”. Rickard and Emma Roijackers gave this imaginatively conceived work its world premiere, perfectly capturing the eerie dialogue of ‘Lullaby Ghost’ and the élan of ‘Slalom’ and ‘White Water’. The outer movements ‘Arrival’ and ‘Departure’ were no less involving, illuminating admirable craftmanship and superb musicianship. Butler took advantage of the forces to produce a piano quintet version of Strauss’s Four Last Songs, here with Helena Moore as the soloist. A sense of rapture was only periodically present, and the relatively monochrome textures from strings and piano robbed the music of its essential opulence. Greater intensity of expression might also have been achieved if the players had worked more as soloists rather than accompanists.
The previous day there had been two 20th century classics with Messiaen’s Quatuor pour le fin de temps occupying the lion’s share of a lunchtime concert. This also featured Oiseaux Tristes from Ravel’s Miroirs (Fan underlining its torpor and weightlessness) and an atmospheric arrangement for cello and guitar of Hildegard von Bingen’s O Virtus Sapientiae, given a suitably prayerful outing by Lydia Hillerudh (cello) and Coby Mendez (guitar). But it was the rapt mysticism and ecstatic joy of the Messiaen, delivered in a blistering account, that confirmed the world class status of this Festival. Among its memorable passages were the unison Danse de la fureur – four players dispatching its asymmetric rhythms with absolute precision; the poise of Gerbrich Meijier’s silky clarinet in Abime des oiseaux, and Roijackers’s sublime violin phrasing in the closing Louange à l’Immortalité de Jesus. Not least was the sense of intimacy achieved by Hillerudh and Junyan Chen in their piano and cello duet.
Crumb’s trailblazing and politically motivated Black Angels (written in 1970 during the height of the Vietnam War) was the other landmark work of the day and the main item for the evening concert. I would wager that this stark masterpiece and unflinching cri du cœur has never been heard in Romsey before, and the sight of four string players along with three sets of water-filled crystal glasses and a pair of suspended gongs gave some indication of the experimental sonorities to be heard. The players (Roijackers, Alice Ivy-Pemberton, Martin Moriarty, and Rainer Crosett) held nothing back in the scorching Night of the Electric Insects. Elsewhere, instruments were variously bowed, plucked, tapped and voices hurled out the number thirteen, but it was the central Pavana Lachrymae, where the players are instructed to play as if belonging to an Elizabethan viol consort, that left a lasting impression – disturbing the ear with its beautiful, if haunting allusion to Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’.
Earlier, there had been Schubert’s Litanie auf das Fest Aller Seelen (arr. Liszt), its devotional mood nicely captured by Fan, who joined Rickard and Hillerudh for Pēteris Vasks’s Lonely Angel (drawn from his String Quartet No. 4), written in response to an angelic visitation he experienced. Built from limited material with diminishing returns, the work’s serenity was readily apparent. Proceedings had begun with Dowland’s In Darkness Let Me Dwell and Bruch’s Aria from his Four Pieces, Op 70, both arranged for four cellos to underline melancholic expression and lyrical warmth.
The festival concluded with Brahms Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor, Op. 60 (published 1875), its emotionally charged performance reflecting the developing passion the composer felt for Clara Schumann during the 1850s. Turbulence and charm were balanced convincingly in the opening Allegro, its striving giving way to a tension-filled Scherzo, where raw energy found poetic release in the delicate exchanges of the Andante. A brooding finale made clear Brahms’s own formidable pianism mirrored here in the athleticism of Fan, her string partners (Rickard, Moriarty and Crosett) no less authoritative in conveying the work’s tragic spirit.