Midlands Classical Music Making

                                         RODERICK WILLIAMS Royal Pump Rooms, Leamington Spa ***** Much-loved baritone Roderick Williams gave the Leamington Festival “a Taste of the Exotic” on Sunday lunchtime, and, boy, didn’t he just! This was such a well-researched programme, full of discoveries which he and pianist Andrew West shared with us so enthusiastically, and Williams’ friendly, engaging introductions were the icing on a cake of wonderful performances. The Festival’s commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the death of Sir Arthur Bliss was continued with his Siege, an early song delivered with driving energy before its enigmatic final note. As throughout the recital, Williams’ body-language, resourceful eye-deployment  and shadings within the vocal registers added to the communication of the music, as did West’s mercurial, responsive alert acco...

 MARK BEBBINGTON Royal Pump Rooms, Leamington Spa ***** Long a major international pianist, Mark Bebbington has equally long been a champion of British music, and this year his attention has turned naturally to former Master of the Queen’s Musick Sir Arthur Bliss, who died 50 years ago. Bliss features largely in this year’s vibrant Leamington Music Festival, and Bebbington’s enthralling lunchtime recital last Saturday featured two works from opposite ends of the composer’s life. Masks, written in 1924, sparkles with an almost Gallic wite and clarity, surely qualifying Bliss as an honorary seventh member of Les Six, while Triptych (1970) profoundly combines both energy and regret, an epitaph of loss (including the composer’s younger brother, killed in the Great War) and, as Bebbington himself indicated, “an anthem for our own troubled times”. Both were given with the pianist’s legendary command of texture, colouring of an extreme range of dynamics, and resourcefully subtle pedal...