New music to the fore: Gergely Madaras & BBC NOW celebrate Cheltenham Music Festival's 80th birthday in rousing style with music from the first festival alongside music for today

BBC National Orchestra of Wales & Gergely Madaras at Cheltenham Town Hall - Cheltenham Music Festival 2025

Britten: Four Sea Interludes from 'Peter Grimes'; Arnold: Symphony No. 5, Anna Semple: Fanfare for Cheltenham; Elgar: Enigma Variations; BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Gergely Madaras; Cheltenham Music Festival at Cheltenham Town Hall
Reviewed 12 July 2025

A celebration of the festival's 80th birthday by reflecting its support for new music from the outset, alongside a new commission in temperature-beating performances

The Cheltenham Music Festival has been celebrating its 80th birthday this year, and Jack Bazalgette's first season as artistic director culminated in a celebratory final concert at Cheltenham Town Hall where Gergely Madaras conducted the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in a programme that both looked back to that first Cheltenham Festival concert and  looked forward.

Founded in 1945, the festival began two years before the first Edinburgh Festival and a year before the Arts Council was founded. The first concert included Benjamin Britten conducting the concert premiere of Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes, just a week after the opera's premiere, alongside William Walton and Arthur Bliss conducting their own work.

At Cheltenham Town Hall on Saturday 12 July 2025, Gergely Madaras and BBC National Orchestra of Wales began with Britten's Four Sea Interludes, then followed this with Malcolm Arnold's Symphony No. 5 which was commissioned by the festival and premiered there in 1961, part of a sequence of contemporary British symphonies at the festival between 1946 and 1964 including works by Rubbra, Ian Whyte, Arthur Benjamin, Robert Simpson, Alun Hoddinott and Alan Rawsthorne. After the interval was the premiere of the latest festival commission, Anna Semple's Fanfare for Cheltenham, and the evening concluded with Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations which was also in that first festival programme.

BBC National Orchestra of Wales & Gergely Madaras at Cheltenham Town Hall - Cheltenham Music Festival 2025

The Edwardian Town Hall is not the home to the municipal offices but was built as the replacement for the 18th century assembly rooms. The main space is a handsome classical hall with a stage that was filled to capacity by the orchestra. However, the sound had surprisingly clarity and immediacy to it.

In the first of the Sea Interludes, 'Dawn', Madaras drew a finely intense string line, the clarity bringing out the detail of Britten's orchestration with great presence. Atmospheric but certainly not comfortable. 'Spring Morning' began with crisp rhythms and evocative bell sounds, with Madaras conjuring real excitement from his players. And I enjoyed the way the elaborate flute line managed to dominate the strings. 'Moonlight' was intimate and hesitant, yet with very definite presence from flutes and woodwind, and then the warm horns. 'Storm' was full of vivid rhythms, yet despite the excitement there was a sense of attention to detail. The tender string melody and vivid woodwind answers led to the devastating end. Overall, it was remarkable quite how much of a bleak Suffolk seascape Madaras and the orchestra managed to convey in a stifling Gloucestershire evening.

When Malcolm Arnold's Symphony No. 5 was premiered in 1961 he was already a troubled soul, with a reputation for unpleasantness and drinking, along with mental health problems that would lead to his hospitalisation at the end of the 1970s. The symphony seems to reflect this restlessness. Though using relatively traditional musical material, Arnold assembled this into a troubled study where fragments rarely cohered for long and anger was never far away. Whilst the opening of the symphony evoked Walton, many of the movements suggested the spirit of Sibelius with his technique of tantalising with melodic fragments that gradual coalesce into the theme. Only here, any coming together was all to brief.

There is another view of the symphony's inspiration, however, as the work arose from the deaths at relatively young ages of four of Malcolm Arnold's friends, the humourist Gerard Hoffnung (for whose festival Arnold wrote A Grand Grand Overture), the clarinettist Frederick Thurston (for whom he wrote two concertos), the choreographer David Paltenghi and the horn player Dennis Brian (for whom Arnold wrote his Horn Concerto No. 2).

The opening 'Tempestuoso' was full of colour and movement, the feeling that the music was going somewhere, and though there were moments when things did come together there was the sense that it was the journey that was the thing. There was an underlying violence to the final climax, but the movement ended eerily in the air. The second movement began with the strings in warmly intimate manner, and as Arnold expanded the orchestral palate the music remained just as moving and reaching Mahlerian intensity (without that composer's portentousness). But after the climax, limpid simplicity returned. The third movement, 'Con fuoco' was all restless fragments and vivid rhythms. There was something of Bernstein's West Side Story (the Symphonic Dances from West Side Story premiered also in 1961) in the feeling malign dance. Arnold did allow the tantalising pieces to come together in the wonderful jazz-inspired riff in the trio. This was only a moment. The mood shattered, leaving us to return to our sense of constant journeying, in search of what? The finale began with an intriguingly distorted march, fife and drum seen through a glass darkly. There were moments when suppressed anger almost overwhelmed, and Madaras ensured that the disparate elements were welded into music that was vividly compelling. A restatement of the second movement melody brought a real heart-on-sleeve moment, yet this too evaporated.

Anna Semple's new work, SoundingDancesEchoes seemed to partake of a similar atmosphere in as much as the work was billed as A Fanfare for Cheltenham yet there was only a brief moment when Semple let everything come together. The opening featured tantalising wisps and fragments of textures and timbres, including timpani, then suddenly a string figure brought things into focus. As intensity grew the music developed real presence and there was a brief, climactical flowering, a not quite fanfare, before disintegration with some final suggestive birdsong.

Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations is more familiar territory. And yet our most recently concert encounter was Dinis Sousa and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in period style [see my review]. Here, Madaras and the orchestra embraced the now and whilst Madaras has worked extensively in the UK, he also brought a European sensibility to the music.

There was plenty of space to the them, intimate and warmly phrased, whilst 'C.A.E.' ebbed and flowed with an almost sea-like quality and a surprising climax. 'H.D.S-P.' was skittering and skittish, light yet with an edge. 'R.B.T.' was perky with a characterful bassoon, yet there were serious moments whilst 'W.M.B.' was by turns noisy and quiet yet always helter-skelter. 'R.P.A.' began with a richly intense sound yet with an elegant dance-like feel in the contrasting moments, and the elegance continued in 'Ysobel' with its stylish viola solo. 'Troyte' was fast and furious, full of tight energy, whilst the beautifully phrased 'W.N.' was lyrically elegant with delightful moments. 'Nimrod' because hushed and intimate with Madaras allowing it to building gradually to a slow yet hardly stately climax. The lightly characterful 'Dorabella' featured another viola solo, then there was constant excitement in 'G.R.S.' with Madaras drawing out the contrasts in the vivid outburst. A yearning cello solo set the mooed for the poignant melancholy of 'B.G.N.' Beginning lightly flowing, Madaras drew all the disparate elements of '*.*.*.' into a mysterious whole. He built the excitement of 'E.D.U.' into a wonderful kaleidoscope of moods, keeping us on the edge of our seats till the end.

The cake celebrating Cheltenham Music Festival's 80th birthday

A word about the excellent (free) programme notes where were written by Will Fox, winner of RPS Young Classical Writers Prize 2024.

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