Cheltenham Music Festival 2012: Time Capsule 1914 -18

Time Capsule: 1914–18

Matisse, Le Violoniste à la fenêtre, 1918

A three-day focus on all things musical and non-musical from this turning-point period in history

LITERATURE Technology Psychiatry Cinema Visual Arts Music

Cheltenham Music Festival

In association with

WEDNESDAY 11 — FRIDAY 13 July 2012

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Time Capsule: 1914–18 is a 3-day total immersion in all things musical and

non-musical, guest-curated by violinist Katharine Gowers. It’s often suggested that the modern world began with the end of the war in 1918. Musically speaking, it’s a fascinating era. Romanticism has its last gasp alongside forward-looking modernity, and Debussy — who died in 1918 — is at the heart of those cross-currents.

Wednesday 11 July

The 1914 Concert M45 11am (ends approx. 12.50pm), Pittville Pump Room £28, £24, £18, Members 10% off (50% concessions apply) Henning Kraggerud violin Katharine Gowers violin Adrian Brendel cello Christian Ihle Hadland piano Janáˇcek Violin Sonata Webern Three pieces Kodaly Duo for violin & cello Joplin Magnetic Rag Ravel Piano Trio

Ben Shephard: What was Shell-Shock?

MT01 2.30pm (ends approx. 3.45pm) Cheltenham Town Hall, Drawing Room £6 (£5 when booking three or more), Members 10% off

During the Great War, so many British soldiers developed mental disorders that the British army was forced to recognise a new condition — ‘shellshock’ — and British doctors were made to rethink their pre-war ideas of how the mind worked. But what exactly was shell-shock? How did it relate to modern Post-traumatic Stress Disorder? How could it be treated? Ben Shephard, author of A War of Nerves, uses the case-histories of individual soldiers to explore the extraordinary medical literature of shell-shock.

Margot van Bers Streeter: The Technology of War MT02 4.30pm (ends approx. 5.30pm) Cheltenham Town Hall, Drawing Room £6 (£5 when booking three or more), Members 10% off

the human capacity for destruction.

Military expert Margot van Bers Streeter investigates the ways in which technology shaped this terrible conflict.

The 1915 Concert M49 7pm (ends approx. 9pm), Pittville Pump Room £28, £24, £18, Members 10% off (50% concessions apply) Henning Kraggerud volin Jennifer Stumm viola Steven Isserlis cello Sally Pryce harp Emily Beynon flute Matthew Hunt clarinet Christian Ihle Hadland piano Connie Shih piano Escher Quartet Debussy Sonata for flute, viola &

harp

Szymanowski Mythes Debussy Sonata for cello & piano Bartok Romanian Dances Reger Clarinet Quintet

www.davechamberlain.smugmug.com

The Other 1915 Concert

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M51 9.30pm (ends approx. 10.40pm) Cheltenham College Chapel £18, Members 10% off One of the defining features of the Great War was the increasing impact of technology on the way war was waged. From missiles and tanks to gas, machine-driven artillery, flame throwers and submarines, advances in technology led to horrifying increases in the scope and scale of

Ex Cathedra Choir Jeffrey Skidmore Conductor Rachmaninov All Night Vigil

(Vespers)

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Thursday 12 July

The 1916 Concert

Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini from Italy and Natalia Goncharova and Kazimir Malevich from Russia.

M52 11am (ends approx. 12.50pm), Pittville Pump Room £28, £24, £18, Members 10% off (50% concessions apply)

Randall Stevenson: Fiction and the Great War

Katharine Gowers violin Beatrice Philips violin Jennifer Stumm viola Adrian Brendel cello Sally Pryce harp Emily Beynon flute Christian Ihle Hadland piano Connie Shih piano

Trenches, Angels and Islands MT04 4.30pm (ends approx. 5.30pm) Cheltenham Town Hall, Drawing Room £6 (£5 when booking three or more), Members 10% off

WWI Piano and Poetry M56 7pm (ends approx. 8.45pm), Parabola Arts Centre £15, Members 10% off Charles Owen piano Katya Apekisheva piano Benedict Cumberbatch reader Margot van Bers Streeter historian

Schoenberg ‘The Iron Brigade’ Rebecca Clarke Lullaby &

Grotesque

Bax Elegaic Trio for flute, viola

& harp Bridge Two Old English Songs Bliss Pastoral for clarinet & piano Busoni Albumblatt Rachmaninov Etudes Tableaux Op.39

Jonathan Black ‘A weird and eerie beauty?’

Modernist Artists and their Vision of the First World War

Randall Stevenson is Professor of 20th Century Literature at the University of Edinburgh, and his new book on literature and the First World War will be published by OUP next year. Here, he considers the difficulties, and Many artists’ work was transformed by successes, of fiction emerging from the shattering experience of the First the Great War, along with its effects World War. Jonathan Black, Research on contemporary literature more Fellow in History of Art at Kingston generally — on developments from University, looks at their collective the Edwardian novel toward literary vision of the war in paintings, drawings, modernism in the 1920s work of Joyce, prints and sculpture. Ranging across the Woolf and Lawrence. combatant countries, artists discussed will include Paul Nash, Wyndham Lewis, CRW Nevinson, Eric Kennington and Charles Sargeant Jagger from Great Britain; Fernand Leger and Georges Braque from France; Otto Dix, George Grosz and Erich Heckel from Germany;

MT03 2.30pm (ends approx. 3.45pm) Cheltenham Town Hall, Drawing Room £6 (£5 when booking three or more), Members 10% off

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This event brings together a selection of World War One poems and prose with contemporaneous, wartimerelated piano pieces.

Debussy En blanc et noir Pièce pour le Vêtement du Blessé Stravinsky Souvenir d’une Marche Boche Granados Marche Militaire Bridge Lament for Solo Piano Ravel Frontispiece Ravel Le Tombeau de Couperin

The Battle of the Ancre

Screening with live accompaniment M58 9.30pm (ends approx. 10.45pm), Parabola Arts Centre £10, Members 10% off John Sweeney piano A special screening of one of the great WW1 documentary films, The Battle of the Ancre and the Advance of the Tanks. Showing the latter stage of the Battle of the Somme, it features here with the original music selection from screenings in 1917.

In partnership with the Imperial War Museum

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Friday 13 July

The 1917 Concert M60 11am (ends approx. 12.50pm), Pittville Pump Room £28, £24, £18, Members 10% off (50% concessions apply) Katharine Gowers violin Steven Isserlis cello Connie Shih piano Charles Owen piano Escher Quartet Fauré Sonata No 1 for cello &

piano

Weill Intermezzo Debussy Sonata for violin & piano Bartók String Quartet No 2

A Soldier and a Maker

by Iain Burnside A new play based on songs, poems and letters of Ivor Gurney M62 Fri 13 Jul 5pm (ends approx. 7.15pm) M67 Sat 14 Jul 3pm (ends approx. 5.15pm) Parabola Arts Centre £20 Members 10% off

beside: soldier, cricketer, crack shot, cake eater, nightwalker, wit, faithful if exasperating friend and, for the last 15 years of his life, asylum inmate.

Interweaving new material with Gurney’s own music, poems and letters, Iain Burnside has created a unique piece of music theatre. His talented cast combines 16 singers, 2 pianists and an actor, all from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London.

‘A heart-rending exploration of war, peace and music’ The Observer

The 1918 Concert M63 8pm (ends approx. 9.50pm), Cheltenham Town Hall £35 £28 £20 £12 Members 10% off Anthony Marwood violin Katharine Gowers violin Jennifer Stumm viola Steven Isserlis cello Matthew Hunt clarinet Connie Shih piano Escher Quartet Stravinsky The Soldier’s Tale suite Bruch String Quintet in A minor Elgar Piano Quintet

At the start of each Time Capsule concert, the journalist and broadcaster Julia Somerville will read a short news bulletin for the year in question – setting the scene politically and culturally for the music to follow.

Three-quarters of a century after his death Ivor Gurney is now celebrated as a poet and a composer. This Gloucester-born tailor’s son preferred the term ‘maker’. He was many things

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Time Capsule: 1914–18 is generously supported by: Royal Norwegian Embassy; Cheltenham Racecourse, Elizabeth Jacobs; Mary Mackenzie, Richard Walton and Friends; Neil and Ann Parrack; The Patrons of Cheltenham Festivals, and in recognition of The Leonora Society.

Matisse image reproduced with permission: Centre Pompidou, Músee national d’art moderne, Paris

Recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3

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