Smith String Quartet/Apollo Chamber Orchestra, St Benet Paul's Wharf/St Giles, Cripplegate, London
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Your support makes all the difference.As part of its 40th-birthday celebrations, the City of London Festival – directed this year for the first time by Kathryn McDowell – is mounting an imaginative project entitled the Angel Series. This brings painting, poetry and music together in "a creative journey" through 12 highly varied programmes of music, including several new works.
The 12 icon-like images of angels painted by the Croatian artist Dragan Andjelic and a sequence of 12 poems by the Welsh poet Gwyneth Lewis are further paralleled by the festival's use of 12 Wren churches. These buildings emerged as a result of the catastrophe of the Great Fire; each festival programme features music that similarly seeks to transcend ex-periences of conflict and suffering.
Last Monday, the sixth recital in the Angel series arrived at St Benet Paul's Wharf, a lovely and surprisingly unspoilt church near St Paul's Cathedral. Here, the Smith String Quartet gave an intelligent and moving account of Shostakovich's Third String Quartet of 1946, penetrating to the heart of this work's intensity of feeling, as they moved away from the apparently lightweight first movement, avoiding investing too much significance in it. Some expressively keen, occasionally raw playing in the middle movements ensued before the cello's artful shaping of the finale's main theme triggered a powerful, bleak conclusion.
George Crumb's Black Angels, its inclusion inevitable, was treated with similar care and passion, but this deployment of extended instrumental techniques in protest at the Vietnam War has dated badly. Too close proximity to all those wine glasses and other paraphernalia and the timing of the performance – the Angel Series are all early-evening recitals – doubtless didn't help; a late-night slot might have worked marvels.
Later, over at St Giles Cripplegate, the youthful and vibrant Apollo Chamber Orchestra, conducted by David Chernaik, bore the brunt of a programme of poetry as well as music based on the theme of London itself, and street cries in particular. The resulting mixture of everything from Jim Parker's John Betjeman settings to Haydn's London Symphony proved undigestable; and Evelyn Ficcara is a much better composer than suggested by her newLondon Cries, limp and uncertain settings of street market cries for two singers (Angela Elliott and Renzo Murrone, uncredited in the rather inadequate programme information) and seven players, plus tape. At least Valerie Bloom's vigorous declamation, with audience participation, of her own Jamaican Market Cries provided some genuine fun.
The Angel Series finishes tomorrow (020-7638 8891) and is also broadcast at lunchtime on BBC Radio 3
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