Paul Riley picks the month’s best concert and opera highlights in the UK
St Endellion Festival
St Endellion Church, nr Port Isaac, 1-11 August
Web: endellionfestivals.org.uk
Tenor Mark Padmore might have handed over the artistic directorship to Roderick Williams and Joely Koos, but opera remains St Endellion’s lodestar – this summer, it’s Verdi’s La Traviata, conducted by Adam Hickox. And in a festival spanning Elgar’s The Kingdom to Britten’s Lachrymae, Padmore joins a lustrous line-up including mezzo Sarah Connolly.
Solem Quartet
Ceredigion Museum, Aberystwyth, 1 August
Web: musicfestaberystwyth.org
Rounding off a two-year project partnering late Beethoven and Bartók with brand new works, the Solem Quartet turn to Bartók’s Quartet No.2 and Beethoven’s Op.132, whose sublime ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ slow movement supplies the starting point for Devotions, a specially commissioned string quartet by Edmund Finnis.
Instruments of Time and Truth
Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, 1 August
Web: timeandtruth.co.uk
The Oxford-based ensemble delves into William Lawes’s consort music ‘for the harpe, base violl, violin, and theorbo’. A 17th-century manuscript in Christ Church library lends a scholarly imprimatur to performances that enlist the brass-wire-strung Irish harp probably intended by Lawes.
Maria Gîlicel
Brantwood, Coniston, 2 August
Web: ldsm.org.uk
On the shores of Coniston Water, John Ruskin’s erstwhile home welcomes the violinist for two concerts. Suffused with Kurtág, the first includes sonatas by Prokofiev, Bacewicz and Ysaÿe; the Bach-inspired second joins Telemann with Winkelman, Auerbach and Mazzoli. (See ‘Backstage with…’, right)
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain
Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden, 4 August
Web: saffronhall.com
The orchestra is joined by soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha for Richard Strauss’s valedictory Four Last Songs. They are framed by Hindemith’s Symphonic Variations on Themes by Weber and the work Bernstein dubbed ‘very jazzy’: Copland’s Symphony No. 3. The Mexican Carlos Miguel Pieto conducts.
Jeremy Denk
University Church, Oxford, 5 August
Web: oxfordpianofestival.com
Richard Goode, Nikolai Lugansky and Kirill Gerstein are among those sharing practical expertise and music-making at the Oxford Piano Festival. The final recital falls to Jeremy Denk, who squares up to all six partitas of JS Bach’s self-styled ‘Op. 1’ Clavier-Übung.
Laura van der Heijden and Jâms Coleman
Town Hall, Dewsbury, 6 August
Web: bbc.co.uk/proms
A near-contemporary of Stravinsky, the Croatian countess Dora Pejačević was a prolific composer, the centenary of whose death is remembered over several BBC P
