Turtle Soup: music in performance in Britain

As this blog testifies, a few weeks ago I had the privilege of joining the Music in the Round team to help run an auction to raise money for their Ebony and Ivory Fund. Music in the Round - who recently won the Chamber Music and Song Award at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards - are primarily based at the Crucible Studio Theatre in Sheffield, where they hold a weeklong festival of talks, events and concerts every May. This is led by their musicians in residence, Ensemble 360, and also features exquisite guest musicians, who this year included pianist Viv McLean and sitar player Jonathan Mayer.

Sketch by Simon Clements of the 'Scottish Influences' concert

The entire festival this year, which was entitled 'Turtle Soup: The Curious Story of Music in Britain', was truly extraordinary, but for me the concert that most affected me was the concert entitled 'Celebrating Britten'.

On the Thursday evening Ensemble 360 performed with the 'internationally renowned tenor' John Mark Ainsley with an evening of Britten and English poetry. It felt apt having this performance with the public dress of Alan Bennett's 'The History Boys' going on next door on the Crucible Mainstage; the performance featured settings of poems by Thomas Hardy, W H Auden and A E Housman - all of which feature in the play - and the play that Bennett wrote after 'The History Boys' ('The Habit of Art') describes an imagined meeting of Britten and Auden. However, much as I love the text of 'The History Boys', I would not have been anywhere else on Thursday night. 'Powerful' doesn't cut it. Beginning with the first half, which featured settings of Hardy by Britten. The poetry and the music are of course strong creations in their own rights but together the eloquence of the poetry is given more life and a theatrical lilt which was never false. Britten wrote some extraordinary operas and this gift is apparent in his songs, but there is a slight vulnerability and isolation from having just one singer. The singer in question - Mr Ainsley - acted his socks off, delineating personalities and sentiments that ranged from jovial love to existential desolation. He also performed Britten's first and third Canticles - the former a love song to his beloved, and the latter a reflection on the Blitz. Having delved deep into paintings of the blitz I have engaged with the struggles of communicating the psychological effects of living with the threat of falling bombs, but this piece seemed to brilliantly bring together feelings of normality (the poem uses the refrain 'Still falls the rain') with the quiet grief of an actual normality lost.

The concert is a fine example of the strength of Music in the Round's programming - bringing together established canonical composers with the new and the hip (the second half featured the stunning James Macmillan and Ireland, two contemporary composers, as well as Frank Bridge and Vaughan Williams). The unique setting of the Crucible Theatre allows for a heightened sense of drama; the audience is not only up close and personal with the performers, they are part of the performance. In the way that when you go to the theatre, if the audience laughs heartily at all the jokes then each individual player has more fun, in this space the response of each audience member becomes part of a shared consciousness in the whole room. We are participants in the performance, entering into a conversation with the music. This is chamber music as it should be.