MUSIC

It’s Bath time again. Paul Riley prepares to take the plunge as the city’s International Music Festival lines up with a globe-straddling selection of genre-bending treats.

For a festival whose al fresco delights have included floating a ghost ship up the Avon to a score by Will Gregory, recreating an 18th-century naval battle in the Roman Baths and blowing trombone fanfares from the upper windows of The Circus, a bagpipes and drums band on the roof of the Abbey for opening night pretty much goes with the territory. But the aerial skirl of the pipes is more than just some determined distraction for the strollers of Milsom St; it flags up a powerful Celtic collision running through the 63rd instalment of the city’s Music Festival. ‘Fire in the Flint’ is the umbrella title sheltering a strand touching base with director Joanna MacGregor’s own roots – explored with typical barrier-blind exuberance. “Celtic music means two things to me,” she says. “It’s reflective and poetic like folk fiddler Martin Hayes’s ‘lonesome touch’ (Hayes teams up with Dennis Cahill in the Assembly Rooms on 26 June); and there’s another side – fiery, political, slightly wild, like the James MacMillan piano concerto I’m playing with the Britten Sinfonia on opening night.”

Last year MacGregor and Northumbrian pipes ambassadress Kathryn Tickell performed together and they’ve hatched an ambitious plan for ‘Fire in the Flint’ which should definitely strike sparks: folk cosies up to classical contemporary in a plethora of premieres implicating the likes of Sanday resident Peter Maxwell Davies and Howard Skempton. “That’s the great thing about being artistic director,” MacGregor enthuses. “It’s about allowing a flow of ideas to happen. We’ve approached a great group of composers, friends and people we’ve worked closely with. Michael Finnissy was an early mentor to me, Alasdair Nicolson and I shared a house 20 years ago, and Jimmy MacMillan would come over for a drink. I like bringing musicians together and seeing what happens.”

Not that the Celts have it all their own way. Another strand, ‘Latina Heights’, does exactly what it says on the tin – from the baroque-meets-Afro-Hispanic world of Diana Baroni to the accordion of Richard Galliano (whose Komedia gig with the Tangara and Carmen Souza Quartets on 29 May should fan some ferocious Latin flames), the South American musings of Patricia Rozario and Craig Ogden to Brazilian percussionist Adriano Adewale. Add in the Abbey-and-Baths-straddling ‘Russian Weddings: Vows and Vespers’ and Bath’s rich skein of thematic threads has got the visa offices working overtime.

Joanna MacGregor may not have programmed 17th-century Thomas Tomkins’s ‘Sad Pavan for these Distracted Times’, but today’s ‘distracted times’ have set her thinking about “past struggles and radical engagement”. “We’re apparently in for an age of austerity and that always tends to make people more political,” she argues, “so we’ve come up with ‘Freedom Songs’ including Billy Bragg, a Brecht/Weill night and the Cornelius Cardew Day. Also there’s Willard White’s tribute to Paul Robeson, Soweto Kinch’s latest project ‘The New Emancipation’ and a specially commissioned tribute to Nina Simone led by Ayanna Witter-Johnson – she’s a great young talent, a classically trained cellist, jazz singer, composer and sassily intelligent soulful musician.”

Tokyo String Quartet to Evan Parker, The Necks to Alina Ibragimova, the four concert grand pianos (and ensemblebash percussion) of Stravinsky’s ‘Les Noces’ to the irresistible Ute Lemper making a festival return after two decades, Bath 2011 seethes with seductive possibilities. It might not be the easiest of times in which to keep a festival flag flying high, but for Joanna MacGregor, fly it must: “Art,” she insists, “is important! It’s about passion, education, health, communication, your sanity, your soul.”

2011'S BATH MUSICFEST RAN FROM 25 MAY-5 JUNE. WEB: WWW.BATHMUSICFEST.ORG.UK

Copyright Paul Riley 2011