Discovery at Cheltenham

Cheltenham, a cream-colored Georgian town at the foot of England's Cotswolds Hills, used to attract people mainly for its mineral waters and its fine public schools. But the war brought aircraft accessory industries to the town, and with the population change, town councilors began to look around for a new attraction. The idea of a music festival came up, and almost before anyone could sound a dissonant note, the deal was on. In 1945 the first ten-day festival was launched. Two years later Conductor Sir John Barbirolli adopted the event as his own. As he has done each year since. Sir John last week bustled into Cheltenham and with Napoleonic gusto took over the festival.

Shooting Presto. Barbirolli made his own choice of composers, spent weeks rehearsing their music, autocratically vetoed suggestions put forward by the Cheltenham council, flew into tantrums, grumbled about terms and generally made himself indispensable. To justify himself, he pointed to the record. "Look at the young men I've introduced here," he said. "Peter Racine Fricker. John Gardner. Alan Rawsthorne. They're all names now. And I introduced them at the Cheltenham Festival. It is the most important music festival in the country . . . Why, do you know what they asked me to play at Edinburgh this year? Scheherazade. Scheherazade! Imagine! I refused. I said to them, 'I'm not coming to Edinburgh to play that kind of palm-court stuff.' But that's what Edinburgh is like now. Cheltenham is different."

The first few days of the festival were pretty much alike, consisting mostly of tried and true Cheltenham favorites and a couple of new works. But on the sixth day, Sir John produced the nugget of the festival, Stanley Bate's Third Symphony. From the first soft notes on the bassoons, it was clear that the work was a discovery. Unusual tone colors glittered against each other throughout the first two movements, and the finale sizzled to a fine climax with a shooting, presto subject and a rolling, Beethovian coda that finished with a bang.

Top Speed. The retired colonels and genteel ladies who made up most of the audience were not swept off their seats, but the press raved. ". . . Full of music that gets up and goes somewhere . . . melodious, impassioned and expertly orchestrated," wrote Cecil Smith in the Daily Express. And the Times was even more enthusiastic: "Tonight's concert may well prove a landmark in the history of . . . our English music . . . a new force among contemporary composers . . ."

Plymouth-born Composer Bate, 40, waited long for last week's success. He wrote his symphony 14 years ago. A top-speed composer, he has written concertos for violin, viola, harpsichord and four for piano, seven ballets, two quartets and lots of other chamber music. A student of Vaughan Williams, he has studied and worked in Paris, New York (on a Guggenheim fellowship) and Australia. Bate, currently working on an opera, has heard little of his orchestral music performed. After hearing the Cheltenham performance he feels encouraged. "I liked hearing that one so much," he says, "I think I'll write another symphony now."

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