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Taking up the mantle of the late Amelia Freedman as artistic director of Bath Bachfest is no small task for Adrian Brendel, but his determination to breathe new life into the two-day festival is apparent, not least in establishing the BachFest Ensemble that unites highly talented players in the early stages of notable careers.
The energy and commitment of the younger players was palpable and, in a concert of music by Handel, Purcell, Bach and Vivaldi, their collaboration with an older cohort – Brendel himself anchoring the ensemble as cellist, together with oboist Nicholas Daniel and the American countertenor Reginald Mobley – there was a very real sense of their joy in performing together and the audience’s in being part of the equation.
In Handel’s Violin Sonata in D major, the soloist was Stephen Waarts, his purity of sound and shaping of the long phrases immaculately realised. Songs by Purcell, in particular O Solitude, showed Mobley’s concern for the primacy of words – his voice more flutey than clarion – but it was in Bach’s Ich Habe Genug that his natural expressivity, combined with Daniel’s heart-stoppingly beautiful obbligato oboe, was most deeply touching. Daniel’s performance of the only recently discovered Oboe Concerto in C minor by Handel, in which elegant lyricism is matched by flamboyant virtuosity, was simply astonishing and his obbligato in Mobley’s spirited aria Fammi Combattere from Handel’s Orlando brought a final flourish.
In a lunchtime recital, the young Finnish-Cuban pianist Anton Mejias’s characterful playing of a series of preludes and fugues, mainly from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier, had highlighted the feverishly fertile nature of Bach’s musical mind. Yet, even their knotty brilliance seemed to pale by comparison with the extraordinary inventiveness of his Goldberg Variations. The inspired programming of Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s arrangement of the variations for string trio – created to mark the 1985 tricentenary of Bach’s birth and arguably the most satisfying of the various instrumental versions of the harpsichord original – offered the perfect finale to the day. It found the indefatigable Brendel now partnering the ensemble members violinist Tim Crawford and violist Noga Shaham, and the intensity of the playing – the serenity, the anguish, the exuberance, the quietly incantatory return of the Aria at the end – was mesmerising. The original title page of the Goldbergs’ score suggests that Bach intended this music to “delight the souls of music-lovers”. This performance certainly did that.
