Review: Orchestral masterpiece and special ballet help bring Lichfield Festival to a splendid climax

The BBC National Orchestra of Wales, with its principal conductor Ryan Bancroft, gave an impressive performance of the Brahms masterpiece - with its melodically rich final movement - in Lichfield Cathedral on Sunday. It followed Finnish cellist Senja Rummakainen thrilling the audience with an intensely passionate interpretation of one of the greatest pieces in the English musical repertoire, Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Marvellous.

With so many performances taking place during this extraordinary festival - in the cathedral, small churches and arts centres - it is impossible to experience everything the festival has to offer. But mention should be made of two rather special events: Ballet Cymru performing Romeo and Juliet in the cathedral, and wine expert Oz Clarke with chamber group Armonico Consort in an evening of vino and music at The Hub At St Mary’s.

Also at The Hub, I was enchanted by a truly dazzling performance by the recorder quartet Palisander - not just on your school descant instrument, but on almost every variety of the recorder from the tiny Garklan, about the size of a hand, to the massive contra-bass, an upright instrument so tall it is blown through a curved metal pipe which sends the player’s breath to the top.

The programme was imaginatively structured around the wives of Henry VIII, and titled “Divorced, Beheaded, Died”, with compositions from the era of each wife, plus one composed by Anne Boleyn, and two by the King himself.

But the stylistic scope of the programme extended beyond this early music, thanks to splendid arrangements by quartet member Miriam Monaghan, who also composed several pieces including one in the form of an Irish Air, and one which included a passage apparently influenced by the harmonies of traditional French dance music.

Palisander was once described in publicity material as “Early Music’s very own Spice Girls”. Charming though the ladies of the quartet are, it is perhaps the most ludicrous thing ever written about any female musicians. How they must have winced.

And talking of female musical achievements, works by French composer Lili Boulanger, Alma Mahler (wife of the great Gustav Mahler) and Clara Schumann (wife of the great Robert Schumann) all featured in a recital by French oboe virtuoso Armand Djikoloum, accompanied by pianist Iyad Sughayer, at Wade Street Church. Fine playing throughout, but Djikoloum was truly stunning in the blisteringly exciting final movement of the Saint-Saens Oboe Sonata.

The order of the programme was rather strange, however, as he opened with a lengthy Oboe Sonata by bone-dry German anti-romantic composer Paul Hindemith, who led a movement in the 1920s under the grim banner “New Objectivity”. A briefer and more melodic piece would have warmed up our ears more effectively.

The festival certainly had plenty of appealing musical fireworks and concluded on Sunday with a rare performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s lesser known operetta The Sorcerer by Charles Court Opera at The Hub arts centre, and with a late-night solo piano recital by long-time festival favourite Danny Driver, appropriately titled Nocturnes, in the cathedral.