Classical Music Guide to 2018
Richard Osborne looks forward to this year’s classical music and opera festivals
According to Geoffrey Chaucer, mid-april is the time when folk ‘longen to goon on pilgrimages’, though pilgrims to this year’s Irishinfluenced Ludlow English Song Weekend will need to gird their loins earlier, for the weekend after Easter (6th–8th April).
The 40th Newbury Spring Festival (12th–26th May, booking 6th March) has Schumann’s Spring symphony in its opening concert, with Stephen Sondheim’s theatrically intriguing Merrily We Roll Along as the fortnight’s notable rarity. A newer event, already noted for its classic repertory and the quality of the artists it provides, is the Chipping Campden Festival (12th–26th May) curated by pianist Paul Lewis in the acoustically superb wool church of St James. Music by Claude Debussy, whose centenary this is, features in Stephen Hough’s recital.
If it’s the wild and wacky you seek, the Brighton Festival (5th–27th May) is the place to be. As well as a dormitory sleepover that promises ‘immersive’ sounds and stories, there’s Spanish theatredirector Calixto Bieito’s latest creation The String Quartet’s Guide to Sex and Anxiety. As for contemporary music itself, the Vale of Glamorgan (9th–16th May) and Presteigne (23rd–28th August, programme late April) festivals are the place to go.
Louis XIV’S Grand Siècle is the theme of this year’s London Festival of Baroque Music with Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice as the powerful chastener (11th–19th May). The Beverley Early Music Festival (24th–27th May) has a
programme inspired by the journals of Dr Charles Burney, whilst the York Early Music Festival concerns itself with the music of ‘Power and Politics’ from medieval Avignon to Beethoven’s Vienna (6th–14th July, booking 5th March).
There will be no music by Hubert Parry (d.1918) when the Carducci Quartet and friends gather at the Parry family’s Gloucestershire home for Carducci at Highnam (18th–20th May). There is, however, music by Parry’s friend Edward Elgar, whose unforgettable 1918 Piano Quintet is scheduled.
Parry also yields precedence during the English Music Festival in Dorchester-on-thames to composer and suffragette Dame Ethel Smyth, the Lady Bracknell of British music. Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas is staged in Dorchester Abbey; Radio 3’s Paul Guinery plays a late-night programme of British Light Piano Music (25th–28th May, booking 15th March).
As summer (we hope) takes hold, devotees of ‘Papa’ Haydn gather in Bridgnorth, Shropshire for the 25th English Haydn Festival, this year looking at connections with contemporary philosophers, explorers and scientists, including our own Slough-domiciled composer and court astronomer, William Herschel (6th–10th June). At the Aldeburgh Festival (8th–24th June), the Bernstein centenary promises similarly interesting juxtapositions between Bernstein, Britten and America in the 1940s.
The Gregynog Festival, founded in 1933, specialises in chamber, choral and early music performed in a house-party setting. ‘Borders’ and women’s emancipation are the 2018 themes (22nd June–1st July, booking 5th March). The East Neuk Festival in Fife is another that offers classic repertory and top-notch performers. There are Bach Cello