The promise of youth

I t is easy to see what attracted Yehudi Menuhin to the north London suburb of Highgate when he moved to the city in 1959. A former village with twinkling streetlights, tall hedges and polished letter boxes, Highgate is one of the closest things available to the fairytale London of Richard Curtis films and Charles Dickens’s happier creations. Close by Menuhin’s former home at 2 The Grove is the soaring spire of St Michael’s Church, the Gothic Revival setting of the opening night of the 2019 Highgate International Chamber Music Festival (HICMF), along with nearby St Anne’s Church, one of the festival’s two homes for a week of music making late last November.

Things began disarmingly with glossy performances of Dvořák’s slight but highly polished op.74 Terzetto for two violins and viola, and a punchy arrangement for string quintet of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in A major op.47 ‘Kreutzer’. No fireworks so far, but the scene was set for a week of stylish playing that shone a new light on familiar repertoire and explored music close to it rather than striking out far into the distance. After the interval came Schubert’s String Quintet. Even in the sweet, sustained triads of the opening, there was an edge to the group’s sound that anticipated the muscular, sinewy performance to come. The players laid bare the whirring cogs of Schubert’s invention without it ever feeling like one of them was about to spring loose. Violist Lawrence Power often seemed to be leading from deep inside the music’s engine room, freeing up first cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason and first violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky to play their passagework, when it came, with the same liquid charisma they brought to their long stretches of poignant melody. The church was packed out for the performance and many of the audience – with lots of children among them – were quick to their feet with cheers and applause.