A secret kept for 50 years?

The Little Missenden Festival marks its fiftieth anniversary this year. Fifty years and still a cult secret? The Festival was co-founded by Ursula Vaughan Williams, who knew a few composers and musicians well enough to attract them to this very small village tucked away in the Chiltern Hills. Until very recently, the Chilterns were like a time warp from another age, even though they're not that far off the M25 and M40 motorways.

So Little Missenden punches way above it weight because top musicians participate because they enjoy themselves in good company. It's too small to be a commercial venture. Concerts take place in the local parish church which was built in Saxon times, and renovated when the Normans conquered Britain in the 11th century. Hence the unique acoustic: walls several feet thick cut out exterior noise, and there aren't windows to dissipate sound.

Look at the photos on the Little Missenden site. Pre booking essential - very limited spaces.

On Sunday 11th, there will be a very special concert. Rohan de Saram, the world -acclaimed cellist, and founder member of the Arditti Quartet, will be playing an afternoon recital. This means a lot as de Saram performed at the very first Festival 50 years ago, when he was a child prodigy, nurtured by Pablo Casals, Mitropoulos and Rostropovich. These days he usually plays in continental Europe so this is a good chance to hear him in England, in the church where he started his career. He'll even be playing the same piece he did then, a cello suite bt Richard Drakeford, who ran the festival for many decades.

John Tavener will feature in this concert too, for Tavener was also associated with Little Missenden. There's a film Tavener and Little Missenden by Tony Palmer who made the film about Ursula Vaughan Williams which blew the lid off the idea that RVW was stuffy and celibate.

De Saram will also be playing David Matthews's early Songs and Dances of Mourning: Matthews too is a Little Missenden regular. On Friday 16th Patricia Rozario. Tavener's muse, sings songs the composer wrote for her. Rachel Podger, Gary Cooper (fortepianist, not Hollywood gunslinger) give a candlelit recital in the tiny Church on Saturday night, and Paul Lewis, regular in all the big halls, plays Beethoven and Schubert on Thursday 15th.

Another Little Missenden exclusive on Wednesday : a concert of Hardanger Fiddle, Nyckelharpa and Hurdy-Gurdy! Not the simple hurdy-gurdy like in Winterreise but a more inventive contraption. Look at SYM trio's site for photos and sound samples.

The photo above is by Eric Hardy.Click on his name to see his photostream, excellent shots of England and medieval churches. Good closeups of the medieval wall paintings in the church and a closeup of a thousand-year-old oak beam.

DANGER ! Xenakis at Aldeburgh

“Dulce periculum est” (danger is sweet), ends the ode from Horace set by Wolfgang Rihm, Quo me rapis. The poet is going where “nothing is slight, mundane or mortal”, yet relishes the unknown. It’s a metaphor for art.

Xenakis, a political radical, dedicated Nuits to “unknown political prisoners……the thousands of forgotten whose very names are lost”. Hence the fragmentation of sound. He uses broken syllables from Sumerian and ancient Persian texts. Phonemes express the idea of half-heard “voices”, and of ruthless suppression. Polyphony creates tumult more powerfully than straightforward word setting. In its own way, Nuits is as concisely aphoristic as a Kurtàg miniature, for the voices here symbolise vast forces, thousand of people silenced over many centuries. Exaudi employs a range of techniques like growls, whistles, the chattering of teeth to expand in sound the idea of fragmented words, each fragments building up a powerful wall of sound. Some of the wailing vowel sounds are held so long it’s as if Exaudi members were practising circular breathing. This makes the sudden, last syllable sound even more distressing, as it cuts off, strangled, in mid air.

.... Xenakis’ Kottos, for solo cello. Rohan de Saram is probably its finest exponent ever. I’ve heard him play this several times, but this was truly stunning. In his quiet, unassuming way he said a few words before starting to explain that Kottos was the son of Gaia, the primordial earth goddess. The full story is gruesome, pitting father against son in titanic struggle. As de Saram says “it’s like Quranos is pushing Kottos back into the womb”. De Saram does amazing things : long, protracted growls of sound scraping at the lowest possible range of the instrument, manically fast microtonal flourishes executed with great precision. Towards the end, de Saram plays conflicting rhythms with such energy that the music seems to levitate on its own dynamism. Look again at the photograph above, where five images of de Saram are superimposed on one another. Kottos is polyphony for a single instrument

http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2008/Jan-Jun08/aldeburgh20062.htm