Chamber music with Anna Dennis, Nicholas Daniel and Mahan Esfahani in The Britten Studio on Holy Saturday
More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
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8 April
Holy Saturday at Snape – An enquiry into the nature of things :
Chamber music with Anna Dennis, Nicholas Daniel and Mahan Esfahani in The Britten Studio
Such a lovely time to be back at Snape, for the first time after a few nights in Suffolk for Aldeburgh Festival in 2019 !
To some, things from former times may more aptly feel to be part of New Year (or Hogmanay), but Easter is – without needing to invoke the opening lines of T. S. Eliot's 'grumble with life' in which he said that he gave us 'The Waste Land' – just as good a time to remember the old and be inspired by it to undertake new things :
In Love & Endings (2022), at an early moment in to-night's programme, we heard Elena Langer's three settings (for soprano, oboe and harpsichord) of two anonymous texts and a poem by Mayakovsky, juxtaposing writing from the sixteenth century and in Middle English* with a head-on confrontation with love that has turned to enquiry, recrimination, but perhaps also resolution.
We had begun with what Handel gave us by way of a Sonata for Oboe, with harpsichord accompaniment – a diamond of a miniature in C Minor that makes us both think and smile – and were to come to a close with arias in which he had set texts by Brockes.
In these, and in arias from two Cantatas by [Johann Sebastian] Bach at something like a midpoint in the eighty-minute recital, the sensitivity of Anna Dennis and the clarity of her expressiveness and diction, were all that one expected from having heard her before (on one of those occasions, in another work by Langer).
Before returning for the Bach, Dennis left Nicholas Daniel and Mahan Esfahani, both of whom had stories to tell about their involvement or engagement with Sven-Ingo Koch, to perform his Die Frage nach der Dinglichkeit (2018), a Ding an sich in relation to which Daniel had attempted a characterization, but whose power and resistance to classification were apparent. As when performing the Langer, Bach and Handel with Dennis, there was also no doubting the respect for and artistic accommodation of each other's role, or the very high quality of interpretation for which one comes and looks to Britten Pears Arts.
Perhaps, by contrast, wrongly responding to the six solo harpsichord pieces by Michael Berkeley that he collectively described as a haiku as if they were witticisms**, and which made one remember that Debussy saved his 'titles' and intended them to appear after each piece in his Prรฉludes. (There is no way that Berkeley's Snake, for solo cor anglais and which he heard next, is programmatic as such, even if he has responded to the tenor of what Lawrence's probably deliberately petit-bourgeois narrator reports thinking about what he sees.)
Of the two concluding Brockes settings, their order reversed - to fit better - from the printed programme, one praised the sweet and tender nature of eternal quietude, and one, to end, unmistakingly found God's handiwork in a rose.
We, with the quietness of thoughts of another at sea, words that asked what were fitting tones for a joyful marriage or the highly conflicted thoughts of the person to whom Berkeley gave voice in reading Lawrence's poem, had truly engaged with the question what makes something what it is.
Happy Easter !
Since posting the above, #UCFF has seen that The Guardian also carried this contemporaneous review by Andrew Clements : 'Anna Dennis / Nicholas Daniel / Mahan Esfahani review – poetry and animal magic'
End-notes :
* The first, without being by John Donne, strangely and pithily full of explicit desire ; the second, thinking of the seasons and of life in relation to their patterns, and of how there is both a consistency and continuity of experience, and a time in life for each thing that it brings us (echoic of Ecclesiastes).
** From a row or two back, a comment reinforced the literalism with which the audience seemed to have responded to 'The Fly', suggesting that it had been swatted in the final gesture.
Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
