The divide between professionals and amateurs in music is profound, but it gets crossed at Dartington: the Devon manor house where star performers, college students and the musical equivalent of Sunday painters coexist in harmony during the annual summer school and festival.
By night the stars give public concerts, but by day they teach, encourage and rub shoulders with a cultural democracy of several hundred people who are there to listen, learn and play. This year you would have found big names such as Alfred Brendel, Emma Kirkby, Judith Weir and Alison Balsom. But you’d also have discovered ad hoc string quartets formed by off-duty judges, politicians, housewives and the odd captain of industry, age range from 16 to a 96-year-old who had come to polish up his string technique. The concerts have a rapid turnover of three per night, and standards vary. But I caught a piano recital by Steven Osborne that would have won standing ovations anywhere in the world, especially for its Debussy: a composer Osborne plays with Presbyterian fierceness (you can tell he’s Scottish) rather than indulgence, but so brilliantly that it becomes an asset. I also heard the pianist Joanna MacGregor (who runs the summer school) playing live, laid-back and luscious jazz accompaniments to a screening of the Charlie Chaplin film The Kid.
