Article published in Manchester Evening News 3 June 2016

EVERYTHING goes quiet in Manchester in the coming week (except at the Royal Northern College of Music), but Chester is celebrating its annual music festival, and a number of our city’s finest are playing there.

The programme features Manchester Camerata in two symphony concerts at St Thomas’s Church, Parkgate Road, with four young conductors being put through their paces. As in previous festivals, these events are the passing-out parade for some of the RNCM’s top international talent in the stick-waving business, and the maestros are Adam Kornas, Carlos Agreda, Matthew Weites and Thiago Santos.

Distinguished RNCM soloists include Kana Ohashi (in Mendelssohn’s violin concerto in E minor, paired with Prokoviev’s ‘Classical’ symphony, June 8) and Jeremy So (in Mozart’s piano concerto no. 25, alongside Haydn symphonies and more Mozart, June 10).

That’s just the start to a festival programme that packs a lot of punch in its 11-day duration. Other highlights include Martin Roscoe (piano), Giovanni Guzzo (violin) and Hannah Roberts (cello) in Schubert and Rachmaninov (Chester Town Hall, June 12), a lunchtime recital of Beethoven and Schubert by Martin Roscoe (same venue, June 13), and a series of performances by Ensemble Deva, the resident and highly flexible group led by Giovanni Guzzo.

There’s an evening devoted to modern US minimalist Steve Reich’s music on June 13, and Saint-Saëns’ Carnival Of The Animals and Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite (among other pieces) re-arranged by horn player Tim Jackson for the occasion on June 14. This time the group includes oboist Rachael Clegg, clarinettist Lynsey Marsh, and pianists Ian Buckle and Ben Powell.

The next evening Ensemble Deva morphs into a string quartet to play a Schubert programme, and on June 16 and 17 it becomes a baroque band to play J S Bach, CPE Bach and Vivaldi (joined on the second evening by soprano Mary Bevan). All these are at the town hall, except the last, which is at St Thomas’s.

But its pièce de résistance is the final concert, when it’s giving Mahler’s Das Lied Von Der Erde at St Thomas’s, in a chamber version with mezzo-soprano Jane Irwin and star tenor Joshua Ellicott, conducted by the Royal Northern College’s own Clark Rundell.

As Clark himself says: “All the festival is made in Chester, and much of the creative responsibility for our programme rests with our musicians themselves. Our own world-class Ensemble Deva is at the heart of the schedule.”