<<  -- 6 --  Keith Bramich    COMING OF AGE

Cecilia Chance's My Paradise Garden uses a startlingly rich vocabulary to summon a vivid picture of a passionate old age, in which 'I shall ditch my rubber galoshes ... Horse manure will be barrowed through my house ... I shall be both priestess and princess'. Geraint Lewis provided the rose-tinted spectacles and the music, simple, tuneful and descriptive, which bubbles up as Chance boils rhubarb to make poison, and becomes reverent and dancy where appropriate.

Simon Mundy, one of the most local poets to Presteigne, and yet a major and influential player on the European arts scene, read poems from his most recent book, After the Games, at a separate Festival event in which some of us discovered the economy, the fun and the warmth of his verse. Mundy wrote The Buzzard especially at the request of Cecilia McDowall, whose initially rather spiky setting, using octaves and ninths, sets the scene for a clever contrast at the moment the bird soars, with accelerating swooping music.

Of all the composers represented in the Garland, Michael Berkeley succeeded soonest in establishing the most distinctive and amazingly spooky sound world (humming soprano and a low held piano note) at the start of the first of his two songs, a setting A E Housman's It nods and curtseys and recovers ..., that clever juxtaposition of nettles blowing in the wind with the lover 'that hanged himself for love' (a high scream from Gillian Keith at this point in Berkeley's music, before it returns to the spooky opening soundworld). Berkeley's second song, setting Edward Thomas, and also about nettles, couldn't be more different -- a slow evocation of time passing in a forgotten and overgrown corner of a farmyard.

John McCabe set Two Gladestry Quatrains by Jo Shapcott, the first person to have won the National Poetry Competition twice, a regular broadcaster, and fast attaining recognition as one of Britain's major poets. Gwaithla Brook is a two stanza personification of fast-moving water, captured by McCabe in his quick, witty and transparent song. Then Cefn hir, again very short, playing with sightings of the real and surreal, which McCabe sets quite simply, as slow accompanying chords beneath faster soprano movement.

Some mystery surrounds the final song, Red Kite Flying. Its composer is Adrian Williams (born 1956), one of the founders of the Presteigne Festival, and the composer of this 2003 Festival's new commission, Children of Baghdad (to be the subject of a future article). The song depicts a passionate walk in the Radnorshire hills on a windy day, striding always onwards, the plight of the unrequited male, and the music whips up this image into a kind of whirlwind of motion and passion, perfect for Gillian Keith's voice and a brilliant way to end the Garland. The words are attributed to Williams' old friend Richard Thomas, one of whose many jobs is to place the signs for Presteigne 'out-of-town' events, but who (for the first time for many years) was mysteriously absent from the 2003 Festival and has been unavailable for comment since. The mood of the poem could hardly have matched Williams's temperament better if he had written it himself.

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