Festival
Where Beau Nash Left Off
By KENNETH GREGORY
SHERMAN is absent from this year's Bath Festival, but the jokes are still good and the city enchanting. It is a brilliant idea to plan a festival around the art, tastes and friends of Yehudi Menuhin, a dedicated and civilised artist if there is one. But how is one to react to the sign a stone's throw from the Abbey—To the Cows'? The fact is Bath's festivities are not confined to serious music-making, but embrace a dairy show. One listens to Menuhin playing Bach in an eighteenth- century church built for the poor of the city, and then, less than ten minutes away, finds the jazz virtuoso Stephane Grapelly performing to an admiring crowd of jivers.
Other jokes are Jess apparent. A few months ago the local justices refused permission to the repertory cinema to show Femenes de Paris (already granted a 'U' certificate in Aberdeen and Ipswich), presumably on the grounds that it might corrupt morals. Yet here at the festival the same cinema was showing Bergman's lusty idyll of the north, Summer with Monika. As Harriet Andersson slipped off her clothes and bounded towards the sea, a clergyman confided to me that he once spent a holiday in the fjords. Perhaps the best joke of all was made by TWW, the regional television company, which not only con- tributed £1,000 but also afforded wide publicity and organised a violin competition judged by 'Menuhin.
Let me suggest to Lord Cilcennin, the chair- man of TWW, that if he wishes to be revered by posterity as a benefactor he should straightway announce the intention of his company to finance future festivals in Bath. At present 140 subscribers guarantee culture in the city. This means a shoe- string bu4get. It is absurd that Bath, whose old theatre witnessed the earliest triumphs of Mrs. Siddons, should boast no festival drama. Let TWW decide, therefore, on a collector's piece for 1960, say Richard HI or Macbeth in eighteenth- century costume with Sir Donald Wolfit rampag- ing to his heart's content. Besides, Bath is in need of Sir Donald's curtain speeches. This year the oxcellence of the hospitality argued that the city's hostesses have never even heard of Mr. Betje- man's 'ordinary little woman' who sat in a Bath tea-shop; they were sublime in their charm, taking over where Beau Nash left off. But it would be pleasant to hear them thanked in the grand manner.
A festival must aim at masterpieces worthily presented. Last week one was sometimes com- pelled to admiration and acceptance rather than downright gratitude. The Festival Chamber Orchestra gave the odd-numbered Brandenburg concertos on Wednesday in Christ Church, with Menuhin as soloist in the first and last and as first violin in No. 3. The outcome made one reflect that chamber groups like the Stuttgart players do not grow up overnight. At the Theatre Royal. Miss Anna Pollak, was allowed to walk off with Bizet's Doctor Miracle rather too easily, while in Dido and iEneas one singer spread his voice in a most unpalatable fashion. However, let it be said that Mr. Colin Davis conducted the Purcell with rare insight. Aided by Miss Joan Hammond's Queen and by a splendidly conceived and articulated Sorceress from Miss Janet Baker, Mr. Davis sometimes obtained results as memorable perhaps (one adds perhaps as a matter of prin- ciple) as those which delighted Bath when Sir Thomas Beecham conducted Zernire et Azor.
But this is, of course, Mr. Menuhin's festival. The programme was as personal as the credits in a Chaplin film, and if some of the Bach tended to the routine things were very different when the Festival Octet undertook what one presumes was an act of devotion on the director's part, Enesco's Octuor in C major. Rarely is music played with such cogency as this fascinating work which begins nationalistically and concludes 10 the mouvetnent de valse as the visionary tribute of a great cosmopolitan. Ensemble was wholly admirable and the chording of the violins in the last movement so burnished that Menuhin might have been purging himself of a discussion held two days before in this same Guildhall Banquet- ing Room. His own contribution to the discussion was all sweetness and light, while Mr. Nicholas Nabokov was amusingly comprehensive. Alas! the third member of the distinguished team was inaudible, while the fourth smiled primly and said almost nothing. Mr. Menuhin is too well• mannered for this kind of thing. Next year he should clear the platform and oblige with a talk on the art of Enesco, to be followed by another performance of the Octuor.
If Enesco caused the Guildhall's ghosts to rub their eyes, Bartok certainly shattered the calm which has reigned in the Theatre Royal since Irving made his farewell appearance there over fifty years ago; the Swedish dancers gave extracts from Cullberg's Medea. and the virtuosity of Mariane Orlando, incidentally a fine classical ballerina, and Caj Selling had the house a-roaring. Elsa Marianne von Rosen added genuine style to the occasion when she danced the pas de deux from Prometheus with Holmgren.
Among exhibitions were Mrs. Langley Moore's Museum of Costume in the Octagon, water- colours by Turner at the Holburne Museum and early Wedgwood at the Victoria Art Gallery. Always at this festival was the eye entranced; one trusts that Lord Cilcennin and Menuhin will take the hint and turn Bath into a major festival city. The transformation has already begun. Did Bath lack a great actor? On second thoughts it did not. Pears sang Britten's settings of Hardy's Winter Words, with the composer at the piano. This was interpretation which amounted to genius. and his singing of Tom Bowling was the most touching thing of the opening days.
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