Bledington Festival: Pavao - St Leonard's Church, Bledington

Wednesday 3rd June 2009

Crackerjack rating: 8 / 10.

This month most musical events in Gloucestershire take place away from the urban centres in picturesque Cotswold villages, such as Bledington, whose annual mini-festival is now in its ninth year.

Mozart's familiar Divertimento in D, K136 is ideal music for a summer's evening, and the young all-female string quartet Pavao, who had played for local schoolchildren in the afternoon, gave a crisp, polished performance of this work.

Pavao are keen advocates of Bax's music and this was evident from their committed playing of his First String Quartet. Although composed at the end of World War I, the opening movement of this work is a cheerful, melodious affair, and the musicians handled the abrupt changes of tempo with great skill.

The lush sounding slow movement is sombre in tone with an eerie central passage which seemed to evoke the ghosts of the fallen.

The Quartet gave a profoundly moving performance of this movement before striking out on the frenzied dance-like finale which blended Russian folk rhythms with an Irish melody.

The second half of the concert was lighter in mood and included Astor Piazzolla's zany Four, for Tango which demanded some unusual playing techniques from the players.

Carlo Martelli's clever arrangements of popular songs went down particularly well with the audience, who spotted quotations from other works. Debussy's Clair de Lune made an appearance in Moon River and as A Nightingale sang in Berkeley Square you could hear A Lark Ascending.

The Bledington Festival ends on Thursday with a performance of music for trumpet and organ by Crispian Steele-Perkins and Thomas Trotter.

Roger Jones