Christ Church Music Festival

Christ Church Cathedral 25th February- 4th March 2000

Christ Church Festival Orchestra:25th February 2000

The Christ Church Music Festival at the cathedral opened with the rendition of pieces by three different composers: Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky, conducted by James Ross, a former student at Christ Church along with Juliet Allen (Christ Church and the Royal Academy of Music) on piano and Aidan Thomson of Magdalen College, leading the Christ Church Festival Orchestra.

The evening opened with Musorgsky's 'Dawn over the Moscow River'. The Introduction to Khovanshchina (1872) - his unfinished opera. This serene music set the rhythm for the compositions that followed - a heady mix of ethereal and elaborate bursts of music. Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No.1 in B -Flat minor (1875) was the second piece. We know the now legendary story behind the writing of this concerto by the master, who spent several nights composing it-the grand opening, followed by a Ukrainian melody and the much discussed opening of the second movement with a flute melody and ending it all with a grand finalé. Rubenstein, for whom the concerto had been composed, had rejected it calling it ' worthless and unplayable . . . bad, trivial, vulgar'. Later, even Rubenstein ended up performing the concerto that came to be hailed as 'strong, grand, lofty and original' by critics.

The evening ended with Stravinsky's masterly composition, The Firebird Suite (1919), based on the original ballet The Firebird composed in 1910. Outlining a Russian legend of the benevolent spirit Firebird, who helps a young Czarevich free the princess, who had been captured by an evil king, Kastchei, the sequences of the ballet unfold gradually. The ethereal notes are broken by a sudden burst when Firebird enters the enchanted garden. The movements that follow evoke the images of rescue of the princess, closing with the dance at the marriage of Czarevich with the princess, which ends with a crescendo with the arrival of Firebird at the celebrations. Said to carry within it the seeds of the controversial ballet Rite of Spring (that created a legend of its own when it was performed in Paris), The Firebird Suite is an enchanting piece and the orchestra did justice to it. In all the choice of compositions was very good and the evening presented some wonderful renditions of them.

We couldn't see the orchestra, but the beautiful arches of the cathedral made up for it (we didn't get the seats that were supposedly allocated to us and ended up sitting at the far end. well, and it's yet another story how we were mistaken for representing the 'Delhi Information'!).. It was a good evening, even though the stone surroundings did not do justice to the magnificent bursts of music that these compositions contain, sometimes making them a bit jarring. I look forward to more performances by this talented orchestra and the other concerts in the Music Festival.

Vibha Joshi 26/02/2000