‘Unalloyed pleasure’:
Celebrating the 75th anniversary of Gŵyl Gregynog Festival
Industry to Impressionism, last year’s popular exhibition at National Museum Wales in Cardiff, drew attention to the Misses Gwendoline and Margaret Davies as pioneering collectors of contemporary French and British art. In June 2008, the focus shifts to Gregynog, their magnificent former home five miles north of Newtown in Powys, and ten days of programming to celebrate 75 years since the sisters founded the Festivals of Music and Poetry at the Hall in 1933.
Gwendoline and Margaret’s early musical experience ranged from recording folksongs with a phonograph in rural Montgomeryshire to attending performances of Lohengrin and the Ring at Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth. Each also worked to develop her own talents. Gwendoline played a Stradivarius violin known as the ‘Parke’ and her surviving sheet music, acquired as far afield as Paris and Dresden, is covered in fingering, bowing and other performance markings. She passed the Intermediate level examination of the Incorporated Society of Musicians at Wrexham in 1897, although the official paperwork was careful to include the solemn disclaimer: ‘This Certificate does not qualify the holder to practice as a Professional Musician’. That said, the programme of a recital given under the auspices of the University College of Wales Musical Club at Aberystwyth in 1911 proves that she was capable of a public performance of the César Franck Sonata. And Margaret, although generally regarded as a painter and wood engraver, also took formal singing lessons and is believed to have studied the harp with Gwendolen Mason.
01686 625007
