For five days each June the little villages on the east coast of Fife host a remarkable musical celebration. This is the East Neuk Festival, and it’s remarkable because for two decades it has attracted some of the world’s top chamber musicians to play in a rural corner of Scotland that otherwise has little high-quality music-making.
Among the ensembles that return year after year are the Pavel Haas Quartet — four Czech string players who play with a fervour and riskiness that is all the more spine-shivering when encountered up close in a smallish venue such as Kilrenny Church. They headlined an all-Czech programme that included Suk’s Meditation on an Old Czech Hymn, which they played first like a veiled echo of ancient polyphony and then attacked with an explosive intensity that almost seemed to shake the building. Yet that was a mere warm-up to their main item: Smetana’s Quartet No 1, From My Life, where Smetana confronts his syphilitic deafness with a devastating musical metaphor that these virtuosic players delivered like a shocking piece of theatre.
Sharing the same concert was another fine Czech ensemble, the Belfiato Wind Quintet. Their main items were a characterful performance of Janacek’s Mladi and an evocative arrangement of music from his opera The Cunning Little Vixen. But they opened with a rarely-heard wind quintet by Pavel Haas (the Czech composer murdered at Auschwitz), the highlight of which was a mercurial and quirky middle movement titled Ballo eccentrico.
More revelations, to me at least, came in a concert in Crail Church by Hisako Kawamura, a German-based Japanese pianist with a fearless style and a penchant for bold repertoire. Between highly charged performances of two Beethoven sonatas (Op 27, 1 and 2) she played Nadia Boulanger’s Vers la vie nouvelle, a hauntingly sad memorial for her sister Lili, and then a remarkable work by one of Nadia’s pupils, Akio Yashiro (who died, very young, in 1976). His Piano Sonata revelled in the rich harmonic language of Messiaen, yet used it to create an entirely different atmosphere: sometimes playful, often violent and full of jolting contrasts. Kawamura delivered it in a blaze of energy yet still had enough in the tank to perform an equally dazzling, frenetically rhythmic encore: the FK Dance by the French composer Guillaume Connesson.
★★★★☆
To be broadcast on Radio 3 and BBC Sounds later this year. Festival continues to June 30, eastneukfestival.com
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