A weekend at Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival

For those expecting to listen to music in a grand setting, Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival lives up to all expectations. The concerts take place in its Marble Hall (pictured below), complete with minstrels’ gallery, rich Jacobean oak panelling, and rather grim portraits of the Cecil family who built and still preside over the estate. Queen Elizabeth I (who grew up in the Old Palace across the garden) gazes at the audience from behind the temporary stage. The current family head, the Earl of Salisbury, shows commendable commitment by sitting in the front row for every concert. Listeners perch on slender gilt chairs that test the endurance, allow no slacking in concentration. Interval drinks are served in an adjoining gallery festooned with suits of armour from the 17th century. One understands the true grandeur of the place when one encounters pictures by Charles II's court painter, Sir Peter Lely, hanging outside the loos.

When it comes to the music, though, the comfy expectations are thoroughly overthrown. Cellist and artistic director Guy Johnston (pictured above) put together a free flowing programme replete with premieres, unusual instruments and musicians who multi-tasked through the weekend. The evening concerts on the Friday, Saturday and Sunday were an extraordinary cross between carefully constructed surveys and extended jam sessions. The musicians were mostly accommodated on the Hatfield estate, which meant that they could join in any of the concerts and play for as long as they fancied. The benefit of this was that the music mixed and matched with abandon, the drawback that every concert continued well beyond its appointed time.

Two ensembles linked everything together, Lodestar Trio and United Strings of Europe (cover stars of this year’s Summer issue of Classical Music), the members finding themselves pulled well beyond their normal repertoire. In the case of Lodestar, that repertoire is highly adventurous anyway. It combines baroque music, mainly Bach, with the rhythms and sounds of Nordic folk traditions, using baroque violin, Norwegian hardanger fiddle (with its extra 'sympathetic' strings beneath the fingerboard to produce a drone effect) and Swedish nyckelharpa, which is not a harp, but looks like an oblong viola (or mediaeval vielle) with keys on the strings - a sort of one person continuo section.

United Strings of Europe is a flexible ensemble of young players from a wide range of European countries, who met at UK conservatoires and mostly still live here. Their repertoire includes works by contemporary composers like Caroline Shaw and Osvaldo Goljov but at Hatfield they also found themselves supporting the ebullient JP Jofre, a virtuoso on the Argentinian bandoneon. His Double Concerto for clarinet and bandoneon (performed during the festival by the composer himself with clarinettist Julian Bliss) creates some fascinating textures, especially with the lower strings and piano. On the Saturday Jofre's music occupied most of the time after the interval, partnering with Mexican guitarist Morgan Szymanski and then an expanding group that eventually gathered in many of the other players at the festival.

Among those was Adam Walker, until 2020 principal flute with the LSO, who gave the world premiere of Robin Holloway's Flute Quartet, a characterful work with some telling pairing between flute and viola. Less compelling, though amiable in a style reminiscent of Gordon Jacob, was the premiere of Three Duets for flute and guitar by Ivan Moseley which started well but gradually lost focus. The other substantial contemporary work was Alec Roth's 2017 song cycle on poetry by Edward Thomas, A Road Less Travelled, written for Szymanski and tenor Mark Padmore. This is a highly evocative and often disturbing set of songs, composed to mark the centenary of Thomas's death at the battle of Arras. It was a perfect complement to the group of Dowland songs that began Padmore's programme, linking across the centuries music which Dowland likely performed himself in the very Marble Hall in which this year’s festival took place.

In between all the bits of innovation audiences enjoyed sessions from the Purcell School and local youth groups and plenty of traditional chamber music too. Sadly, pianist Kathryn Stott had hurt her thumb tripping over a dog, so the piano duties were shared out, mainly between Mishka Rushdie Momen (who I had heard the week before accompanying in Kronberg at the opening of its Casals Forum) and the excellent Katya Apekisheva, who gamely kept up with Walker in Prokofiev's Flute Sonata. Perhaps the most telling chamber performance, though, was by Guy Johnston himself, partnered by Szymanski in a cello and guitar arrangement of Falla's Suite Populaire Espagnole that captured all the energy and passion of the song originals.

The real joy of this festival is the clash between a stately home event that is really still hosted in a home, despite is magnificence, and a programme that goes against all the normal rules of concert construction. It has been going for 11 years but the sense is that it is becoming ever more adventurous, to the great credit of its board and sponsors, as well as its artistic director.