RYEDALE Festival’s unique triple concert – with the audience in three groups revolving around Castle Howard – involved harpist Catrin Finch in a world premiere by James MacMillan (resident composer at Ryedale this summer), the Phoenix Trio in Shostakovich, and the Marian Consort in Allegri’s Miserere, as eclectic a mix as you could imagine.

Finch can be quick-silver around the strings, but Macmillan’s Motet IV began ruminatively, with occasional flashes of activity, which gradually became more electric when superimposed on a trill. It ended with high chords over a rustling motif, delicately engaging. Playing in the resonant Grand Hall, she showed her wide-ranging prowess in Hindemith’s sonata, majestic in depicting church bells and organ, skittish with children at play.

The Phoenix was vitally attuned to the many contrasts in Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No 2 in E minor (1944), written after the death of his loyal friend, the critic Ivan Sollertinsky, aged 41. Its eerie cello harmonics at the start were other-worldly, the insistent thrumming ominous. The scherzo was a furious helter-skelter, closing abruptly. Grief returned in the finale’s chorale, with plaintive violin. The jaunty Jewish dance, increasingly impassioned, offered temporary catharsis.

The ten singers of the Marian Consort, conducted by Rory McCleery, spread out around the Chapel for the Allegri, with the semi-chorus in the gallery and the cantor hidden near the altar. It worked, and the high soprano descent was thrilling. MacMillan’s own Miserere, using the same Latin of Psalm 51, cleverly inflects the original plainsong in several keys, and its coda was hypnotic in the Marian’s hands.

York Press:

Tenor Joshua Ellicott

Two morning concerts boasted Ryedale’s special atmosphere. Joshua Ellicott’s tenor was in fine fettle in two Vaughan Williams song-cycles providing the sandwich for Beethoven’s An Die Ferne Geliebte (To The Distant Beloved). It was a tasty menu, made all the more so by Christopher Glynn’s extraordinarily sensitive contribution from the piano.

Ellicott was quite dilatory in the Songs Of Travel – his vagabond was no power walker – but he made every word of Stevenson’s poetry count. His Beethoven was equally thoughtful, with Glynn’s cantabile intro to the final song also conjuring the lover’s regret.

The Heath Quartet added a telling commentary in On Wenlock Edge which, after its stormy opening, was relatively calm, evoking a lovely pastoral nostalgia.

Llŷr Williams stepped in at barely three days’ notice to play one of the Everests of the piano repertoire, Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations on the Duncombe Park Steinway, after the announced pianist needed an operation. It was an act of extreme courage that paid handsome dividends. The notes emerged as if from Beethoven himself, seemingly autobiographical: bluff, bold, visionary, iconoclastic.

Williams has an immense technique that allows the whole gamut of emotions, with violence and gentleness easily juxtaposed here. He brought humour to the scherzando, and reflection to the late Andante, but everywhere a theatrical volatility that was absolutely breath-taking – and authentic.