East Neuk Festival
Tallis Scholars/SCO Cellos/Renaud Garcia-Fons
The Bowhouse, by St Monans
Keith Bruce
five stars
IN its own precocious teenage years (like a couple of the composers it annually champions), Fife’s East Neuk Festival might add the potato crate to the scallop shell of the seaside that serves as its  symbol. Alongside the beautiful church buildings in which it stages memorable performance of chamber music, repurposed farm buildings have revealed remarkable acoustic qualities for larger events.
On Friday the two combined for performances by French-Canadian cellist Jean-Guihen Queyras of  Bach suites for his instrument in the lovely church above the harbour at St Monans and continuing, in the late evening in low light, at The Bowhouse. The third of them, played at the centre of the afternoon recital, contains the best-known music, and was quite exquisitely performed, and Queyras then took his Bach journey down a fascinating path by encoring with Shadows by Gyorgy Kurtag, and then adding two more brief Kurtag works to the programme later. Here was an artist on technically astounding form taking inspiration from his festival context to steer its Bach Day in a fascinating extra-mural direction.
That juxtaposition of early music with 20th Century compositions was spread over the two concerts by conductor Peter Phillips and his Tallis Scholars. On Friday evening, before the solo cello denouement, his ten singers explored the liturgical music of Josquin des Prez and his British successor William Byrd, separating Byrd’s Five-Voice Mass setting with Josquin’s Miserere, Stabat Mater and Absalon, fili mi. Depending, perhaps, on each audience-member’s own listening habit, here was music of varying degrees of familiarity, but all of it illustrating a crucial century of musical development that created cadences that were explored by composers to come. For the local audience, the concluding Gloria by Scotland’s Robert Carver, was the complex, early, icing on the cake.
ANY young cello student would have found a world of wonders at this year’s East Neuk Festival, but the one who demonstrated most clearly what he had learned was Spaniard Victor Garcia Garcia, in his vigorous contribution to Saturday morning’s Mendelssohn Quintet in Kilkenny Church. The fruit of the ENF Retreat that teams international students with instrumental mentors, it preceded a very fine Brahms Clarinet quintet with senior participants Alexander Janiczek and Krzysztof Chorzelski in the group. The Mendelssohn, however, was particularly memorable for the way in which the individual younger talents combined to grow as an ensemble during its performance, and Victor Garcia Garcia was at the heart of that.
Guitarist Thibault Cauvin’s late afternoon journey in Anstruther’s St Ayle’s was around great cities of the world, with a sparkling arrangement of Billy Strayhorn’s Take the A Train representing New York and sitting alongside works he has commissioned inspired by Kolkata and Istanbul. The weather made opening with the Mallorca and Cadiz of Isaac Albeniz doubly appropriate.
The evening’s event at The Bowhouse was the day’s most remarkable trip, however. Returning to early music for Allegri’s Miserere only at the concert’s conclusion, the Tallis Scholars added John Tavener’s familiar Funeral Ikos to four works by Arvo Part, of which the Magnificat which closed the first half was especially memorable. Interwoven with these, the same composer’s Fratres, for eight cellos, was followed by Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint and Krzysztof Penderecki’s Agnus Dei by the same line-up. Three composers of the same vintage (all in their 80s now) with quite remarkably distinct, yet related, things to say using a very particular palette: this would have been an unmissable one-off even without the addition of two solo improvisations by bassist Renaud Garcia-Fons, whose ridiculously original virtuoso technique usurps territory normally the preserve of the classical guitar, never mind the cello.