Bah-humbuggers like me are happy to pass over seasonal fare, maybe excepting a Messiah or Christmas Oratorio, and look ahead to the birds that sing in the spring. That was the theme for this light-of-touch rattlebag, with versatile top quality on display from all performers.
Maybe parts of it smacked of a tantalising taster menu. Violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason came on at the start, advertised only through the first of Fantasia mover and shaker Tom Fetherstonhaugh’s short speeches, to twitter with leader Millie Ashton in the opening Allegro of Vivaldi’s “Spring” Concerto - so fresh and buoyant that it left us wanting the other two movements.
We all love Lucy Crowe, and we’re sorry she went down with a bug on Saturday, but her replacement is every inch her equal, Elizabeth Watts, and the revelation of her full, richly coloured tone married to textural meaning in Strauss’s “Frühling” deserved to be followed by the other three Last Songs. Similarly “The Nightingale” from Berg’s Seven Early Songs made one want to hear the other six – not usually the case in these overperformed pieces.
With 24 hours’ notice, and one rehearsal, Watts made a couple of significant and impressive substitutions, The first was that magical nightingale number, “Sweet bird”, from Handel’s L’Allegro in place of “As when the dove laments her love”; the artistry here was equalled by Fantasia flautist Jaymee Coonjobeeharry. And in the second half Gershwin’s “Little Jazz Bird” was replaced by Rimsky-Korsakov’s vintage Orientalia “The Nightingale and the Rose”, where a late high-line act took the breath away. Watts’ Mozart arias disc has long been a winner, so it wasn no surprise that the Figaro Countess’s “Dove sono” was a model of fine articulation and expressive urging.
A fourth language was not to be added to Watts’ armoury simply because there wasn’t time to learn and polish Messiaen’s “The Lovebird of the Star” from Harawi. But resident arranger Harry Baker had made such an exquisite and idiomatic orchestration of it that Fetherstonhaugh decided to play it without the voice – an excellent and spellbinding idea, with Alina Vorobeyava’s clarinet taking on the avian voice here. Baker’s arrangement of Florence Price’s short organ piece Little Pastorale was a beauty too. It would serve as a perfect guess-the-composer encore piece.
The chance for longer stretches came first with the second 2025 performance of Blasio Kavuma’s I am the Sea, commissioned by the Deal Music and Arts Festival. This is a new work that really goes somewhere, evoking the salt doll who dissolves into the ocean and discovers who she is. Again a good opportunity for fine instrumental solos, improvised and otherwise, and a magical final fusion. Fetherstonhaugh showed that not all his approaches to 18th century works had to be fleet and nimble in Haydn’s Symphony No. 83, “The Hen”, had a robust, earthy character, with unequival illustration of the peckings from the all-female violin section (pictured below), oboist Rees Webster and later, in the recap and even higher, the flute. The audience applauded spontaneously between movements, and that was just fine.
To cap it all, Watts showed she was just at home in natural delivery of Kosma’s “Autumn Leaves” as adapted by Johnny Mercer, immortalised by Nat King Cole – the favourite song of my guest’s late father – and beautifully arranged by Baker, and Sherwin’s “A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square”, with Braimah Kanneh-Mason rejoining the party. No forced jollity here; as throughout, everything felt spontaneous and sincere.
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