“One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!” George Eliot (in Middlemarch) points us to the social circularity behind a gift: and this Hansel given at Snape was a perfect example, with three exceptional musicians, Julius Drake, Mark Padmore and Krzysztof Chorzelski, ‘giving back’ their skills in performance in aid of two charities which support the education and training of young musicians, while celebrating the 70th birthday of their friend Penny Jonas, with gratitude for Penny’s recent two-year stint in the Aldeburgh Festival’s Development department.
We were treated to an evening of song by Schubert, Vaughan Williams, Dowland and, of course, Britten, sung by Mark Padmore, while noted violist Chorzelski gave us a gift of his own: a recent composition by Joseph Phibbs, Letters from Warsaw, performed this evening in the presence of the composer, who was commissioned by Chorzelski to write a piece for piano and viola inspired by a treasure-trove of letters by Chorzelski’s grandmother, written from the Warsaw ghetto.
