The Two Moors festival, set up more than two decades ago in the wake of the foot-and-mouth epidemic, has established its own niche in the British festival schedule outside the crammed summer season. The two moors are Dartmoor and Exmoor, with concerts in the towns and villages of both and straddling a geographic area in Devon and Somerset that’s reckoned to be the largest covered by any festival in the UK.
Under its current artistic director, violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen, the emphasis of the programming is on chamber music and song. A weekend of concerts on Dartmoor is followed by another on Exmoor, and each seems to have its own faithful following, and to judge from the final couple of days on Exmoor, it’s an event that has really embedded itself in the local community.
But there was something charmingly relaxed and a bit haphazard about the first concert I heard, given by the soprano Ruby Hughes, violinist Mathilde Milwidsky and pianist Huw Watkins, with the spoken-word poet Dave Neita. Its theme was apparently homecoming, but with items swapped, replaced or omitted altogether, the programme turned out markedly different from what had been promised.
After introductory poems by Neita, there was music by Vaughan Williams, Britten, Schumann, Bloch and Bach, with the premiere of a specially commissioned song cycle, Liberty, by Deborah Pritchard as its centrepiece. Pritchard’s three songs for soprano, violin and piano set texts by John Donne (“No man is an island”), Emma Lazarus (The New Colossus, the words engraved on the Statue of Liberty) and Neita (Alight, specially written for the cycle). Clearly influenced by Britten, Pritchard’s word setting is adroit and sensitive, the interplay between the voice and instruments tellingly expressive, and relished by Hughes and her colleagues; it could easily have been a more extensive work, but still worked well on its own terms.
The theme of the final festival concert was “Gemütlichkeit: Love’s Philosophy”, emphasising the importance in the 19th century of home music-making, whether in chamber works or song. The baritone James Newby and pianist Christopher Glynn sang a sequence of songs by Brahms and Mahler, after the Sitkovetsky Trio performed Schubert’s B flat Piano Trio. Their account was a very fine one, full of nicely coloured detail, and touchingly direct in the exquisite slow movement, but it was overshadowed by the performance the group had given the previous evening of Tchaikovsky’s great Piano Trio, a work of almost orchestral sweep and grandeur, and ferociously demanding for all three musicians. It’s heard too rarely, but when played with the kind of conviction and authority that the Sitkovetsky brought to it here, it was an overwhelming experience, and well worth the trip to Exmoor all on its own.