The Cheltenham festival has been going now for 60 years, and for the past 10 of those Michael Berkeley has been its artistic director. This is his last year and he is going out on a high, having restored much of the lustre that the festival lost during the 1980s, and re-energised its mission to promote contemporary music.
Operas by Benjamin Britten (Berkeley's godfather) frame this year's programme, though whether Death in Venice is well served in a concert performance is arguable. There was no doubting the power and authority of this account with the City of London Sinfonia under Richard Hickox, which relished the harmonic adventures the score offers. Philip Langridge's Aschenbach was magnificent too, elegantly phrased and individually coloured: a complete portrait of a self-absorbed man whose personal crisis is as much intellectual as it is emotional. Alan Opie made every one of the succession of characters who lead Aschenbach to self-destruction vivid and threatening, and Michael Chance was a wonderfully musical Voice of Apollo.
The smaller roles were capably filled by members of the BBC Singers (I assume - the programme book is not one of Cheltenham's strengths). However, when the visual element with its all-important dance is excluded from the work, the score's longueurs become obvious. Despite the exotic colourings, there is a lot of padding in the choral writing, so that Death in Venice never touches the heights of Britten's greatest stage works.
There are more than 60 premieres scattered through this year's Cheltenham programmes, and five of them were included in the opening late-night concert in the Pittville Pump Room, given by the Duke Quartet. David Matthews's Little Serenade, elegant and Ravel-like, was the first of 10 miniatures that Berkeley has commissioned to mark his departure, while Andrew Toovey's Going Home put together a frieze of vivid episodes, unostentatiously integrated.
Phillip Neil Martin's An Outburst of Time was far more striking and expressively charged than his self-justifying programme note promised. And Emily Hall's Time Back for Time Forgiven was terse and effective - two qualities that Graham Fitkin's laboured Pawn, composed when the composer was "thinking a lot about democracy", conspicuously lacked.
