A learned crowd: Postcard from Cambridge

Opened to students for the first time in 1977, Robinson College is one of the newest of the Cambridge colleges. Its red-brick facade runs along a residential street, giving little hint of the landscaped gardens within, for which the college buildings form an architecturally distinctive terraced backdrop. There is even an outdoor theatre, not that there was any chance of that being required on the drizzly October night of my visit to the 2021 Cambridge Music Festival (CMF). Instead, it was the college chapel that made a fine venue for a performance of Gérard Grisey’s Vortex temporum.

Unlike the more famous Cambridge chapels, with their naves and oppositional seating, this one has a lateral orientation. The congregation (or audience) sits in elongated semicircular rows facing an altar positioned on one of its long walls, much as you would find in a concert hall. A stained-glass window, designed for the college by the 20th-century British artist John Piper, gives the calm space a modern-art touch.

It is in front of this window that the performers sat: members of Next, a year-long training programme in contemporary music and career-building for Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (RBC) students as well as for postgraduates and recent graduates from other UK and European institutions, run by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and RBC. The string players involved were violinist Olivia Jago, violist Cameron Howe and cellist Carwyn Jones…