The Medici Quartet celebrate their 30th anniversary this year, so you might have expected them to commission an experienced quartet composer to mark the occasion. Instead the honours have fallen to George Fenton, the man who wrote the theme tune to the Nine O'Clock News.
The bait for this seemingly bizarre choice was the Alan Bennett connection. A film and theatrical composer by trade, Fenton has a long association with Bennett, having provided background music to both series of Talking Heads.
This improbable collaboration was the highlight of the Harrogate Festival - and the Royal Hall was bursting with blue-haired Bennett groupies who irritated the Medici Quartet no end by failing to switch off their mobile phones and launching into loud applause during every pause of Dvorak's "American" Quartet. The ladies in front of me thought that the silence following the first movement was a poor response, and that maybe the Medicis would be cheered by a big, Harrogate welcome.
They got nothing like the welcome accorded Bennett himself, of course, whose shuffling, pigeon-toed appearance elicited the kind of response the Pope usually receives on Easter Sunday. As Fenton's piece, Hymn, struck up to the strains of The Lord's My Shepherd, it seemed for one ghastly moment that Bennett was about to sing. But the 30-minute work soon settled into its pattern of Hovis-advert blandishments and rather harshly amplified anecdotes from the author over the top.
Fenton is a fine film composer, who has received Oscar nominations for his work on Dangerous Liaisons and Ghandi. But the structure of his score is never strong enough to follow its own logic, and remains slavishly tied to a sequence of visual images. Invariably these involve Bennett trudging through cobbled Leeds suburbs or rolling Yorkshire Dales, as he ruminates on his early musical memories.
There are plenty of prime Bennettisms in the text to enjoy, especially his reminiscences of conductors at Leeds Town Hall: Sir Malcolm Sargent, never without his carnation, and Sir John Barbirolli, frequently without his bottom set of teeth. But the mystery remains why the Medicis were so eager to slip into the background of their own birthday party.
