Review: Ryedale Festival, Alan Bennett’s Hymn, Birdsall House, Malton, July 23

BIRDSALL House made its debut as a festival venue on Monday with two performances of an intriguing programme based around Alan Bennett’s memoir, Hymn.

The original house dates from the 1540s. Its ballroom was added as part of the south-west wing in 1776; its understated splendour made an ideal setting for chamber music.

Bennett’s recollections of childhood in Leeds before and during the Second World War are deeply layered with rueful nostalgia. Some of his most powerful memories come from hymns sung in school assembly, so that Hymn inevitably exudes a sense of celebration as well as recollection, invariably tinged with humour. The actor Alex Jennings, dressed in tweed jacket and one of Bennett’s ties, uncannily reproduced Bennett’s vocal idiosyncrasies, right down to his sing-song West Riding vowels.

Accompanying the story was George Fenton’s score, which evoked not merely some of the hymns, but memories of Delius, Palm Court trios and Bennett’s own misdemeanours as a would-be violinist. The Heath Quartet gave it with graceful wit.

They were joined after the interval by the Carducci Quartet in Mendelssohn’s Octet for strings, that miracle created by a 16-year-old. Despite stifling evening humidity, they played as if lives were at stake, utter commitment allied to joyous abandon.

The cellos provide a hyper-enthusiastic engine-room. Perhaps it was a touch bottom-heavy, but the andante reflected Bennett’s melancholy, and elsewhere Oliver Heath’s bravura at the top plus prodigious precision below made it breathtakingly memorable.

Martin Dreyer