Reawakening and musical defiance as festival returns
East Neuk Festival
An ominous haar rolled across Fife’s East Neuk at the weekend, and with it an unseasonal chill, as if to remind us these are not normal times.
Nor was this an East Neuk Festival marked by the usual frenzied crisscrossing of the region’s assorted villages and venues.
Covid restrictions dictated a downscaled live programme element over three days in one venue – the utilitarian Bowhouse – with a significant limitation on audience numbers, each performance curtailed to around an hour.
But it was real, it was live, and the sense of reawakening among masked attendees was palpable.
It was a liberating moment, too, for the hard-hit musicians, perhaps unwittingly illustrated by the young Russian pianist Samson Tsoy (***), who launched into Friday’s recital with ferocious fistfuls of crashing dissonance.
This was Hommage a Csajkovszkij – the first of a selection of pieces from Kurtág’s anarchic Játékok collection – which mischievously parodies the famous chords from Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. A defiant gesture?
Tsoy was at his most convincing here, igniting their wit and pathos with the fullest armoury of expression. It was an approach that didn’t always favour Schubert’s late Sonata in B flat, though, which offered Tsoy the option to hold back a little and allow its freeflowing elements to work their own magic.
There were plenty moments of ringing, lyrical beauty and imaginative pacing, but also a sense of overindulgence that undermined the bigger picture.
Saturday morning introduced the violin-guitar partnership of Benjamin Baker and Sean Shibe, along with pianist Daniel Lebhardt (***) in various combos: Baker (troubled by periodic wayward intonation) and Shibe wresting a mix of Moorish and Iberian sparkle from De Falla’s Siete Canciones, and rustic verve from Bartók’s Romanian Dances, Baker and Lebhardt closing the recital with Pärt’s mesmerising Spiegel im Spiegel.
The latter duo also premiered Matthew Kaner’s Five Highland Scenes, charmed vignettes embracing sparing impressionism and rhapsodic incantations from which emerge crisper textures and ultimately a soulfulness underpinning lyrical echoes of Vaughan Williams with spiritual harmonies of Messiaen.
It was a resilient Castalian Quartet in the first of two recitals ( **** ), that battled through Beethoven’s earliest String Quartet Op18 No3 amid the clamour of torrential rain. It didn’t dampen the sunny, distinctive poeticism of their performance.
And with the torrent abated, they found every opportunity to unearth and untangle the stormy ambiguities of Dvorak’s final A Flat Quartet, Op105.
Their Sunday programme ( ***** ) was a Mendelssohn double bill with a twist. One work was by Felix (the F minor Op80), the other in E flat by sister Fanny. We weren’t told which was which, but in the end sustainable quality gave the game away.
Two brilliant performances with wild and dangerous finales from an ensemble that has something very unique to offer.
Saturday had ended with a supreme Paul Lewis programme ( ***** ) in which the pianist journeyed from the Classical concision of Mozart’s jewel-like A Major Sonata, K331 to the programmatic heft of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, by way of Scriabin’s searching Five Preludes, Op74.
It was compelling from the word go, Lewis’ nuanced Mozartian precision laced with an instinctive inevitability that contrasted vividly with the otherworldly questioning of Scriabin.
He chose to segue seamlessly into the Mussorgsky, a move that prolonged our lingering thoughts on the Scriabin while effecting an eerie instability in the latter as it took flight. Lewis eschewed his usual cool sensibilities.
Pictures was seismic, electrifyingly iridescent; the piano still resonating way beyond the final strike.
Another gesture of artistic defiance?