Final Report Gala Concert – Ryedale Festival ends in 2024

Jessie Montgomery, Strauss and Beethoven feature in the final concert of this year’s Ryedale Festival.

Orchestra of Opera Noord (Photo: Marc Eskenazi)

The Ryedale Festival came to a magnificent close with this concert in the elegant surroundings of Hovingham Hall in an idyllic Yorkshire village. Hovingham looks like one of those seductive publicity photos that lure you in to experience a real country village, complete with golden stone cottages with roses around the door, a quaint shop, an old church, a pub and a manor house, and of course the Lord of the Manor and his Lady in the aristocratic persons of Sir Marcus and Lady Worsley. No wonder so many people are lured across the Atlantic for this experience, which forms the backdrop to one of the many excellent events.

The Ryedale Festival this year has surpassed all previous years in ticket sales and has even surpassed them in sales. It has staged a staggering 58 events in 37 different venues, most of which are not conventional concert halls but historic stately homes, churches and abbeys. For this latest concert, the beautiful Riding School at Hovingham Hall hosted the excellent Orchestra of Opera North under its dynamic new director, Katie Stillman.

“This year’s Ryedale Festival has surpassed all previous years’ ticket sales…”

Hovingham Hall (Photo: Marc Eskenazi)

Jessie Montgomery’s Banner is a 200^e anniversary tribute to The Star-Spangled Bannerwith a string quartet set against the rest of the orchestra, a structure meant to represent societal change driven by individuals against the consensus. If that sounds a little pretentious, the music dispels that idea, and it was played with verve and commitment.

Strauss’ Concertino for clarinet and bassoon was his last purely instrumental work, written just before the composition of the Four last numbersIt features two instrumental virtuosos, here clarinetist Katherine Lacy and bassoonist Adam MacKenzie, and is instantly recognisable as a late work, full of nostalgia.

Robert Schumann said about Beethoven’s 1^st Symphony“Do not look for Beethoven’s genius in his last symphony, for you can easily find it in his first.” The orchestra certainly lived up to its greatness with a stirring performance, conducted from the front chair by Katie Stillman; the Andante sings with motor was played exceptionally well and the last movement, with its hasty movements and sense of surrender, concluded the concert and the festival in an exciting manner.

• Streams of previous Ryedale Festival performances can be found here.