Festival comes back to its roots on the moors
The internationally-renowned Two Moors Festival returns this weekend with a series of events centring around Devon
AFTER a year of rediscovering the world outside our doors, the Two Moors Festival returns with its theme Arcadia Unlocked. The internationally-renowned classical music festival takes place over two weekends in October.
Dartmoor is the focus for October 1-3, while concerts from October 8-10 centre around Exmoor, with concerts held near each other in beautiful venues from rural arts centres to churches around the vast and arresting wilderness of the moors.
The natural world provides the inspiration for cycles of waste and renewal natural and man-made – by percussionist Joby Burgess, and is heard in birdsong with folk singer Sam Lee and pianist George Fu. Ruby Hughes and Jonas Nordberg bring the ancient beauty of Albion to the moors, while memories of the Welsh countryside are central to the world premiere of composer-inresidence Huw Watkins’ Welsh Songs by Nicky Spence, one of internationallyrenowned artists visiting the moors this year, including Pavel Kolesnikov, Lawrence Power and Stile Antico.
The festival was founded by the visionary John and Penny Adie in response to the Foot and Mouth crisis of 2001, which was devastating to the area.
After the 2020 online festival in the wake of the pandemic, Tamsin WaleyCohen returns to curate her first full festival. Violinist and director WaleyCohen said: “This year we bring the festival back to its roots on the moors ....
“The theme and title of the festival is Arcadia Unlocked, a celebration of the Natural World, which makes itself felt so powerfully here. During the planned festival, we will explore the seasons, the passing of time, environmental issues, ecological concerns, and nature as metaphor, inspiration, and as our ultimate source of beauty, which we return to again and again.”
The Two Moors Festival opens in Dartmoor tonight, with soprano Ruby Hughes and lutenist Jonas Nordberg in recital, at Widecombe-in-the-Moor with a programme of Dowland, Purcell,
Britten and Errollyn Wallen. In the late evening, pianist Cordelia Williams charts a journey from the depths of night towards dawn, acknowledging music’s cathartic ability to bring peace and consolation in tumultuous times, traversing works by Mozart, Scriabin, Liszt, Schubert and Schmann.
Birdsong heralds the morning tomorrow with American pianist George Fu performing avian-inspired works by Messiaen, Respighi and Ravel and the world premiere of his own work Three Paraphrases from Respighi’s The Bird, after a pre-concert talk on birdwatching by Emma Cunis, ‘Dartmoor’s Daughter’.
In a lunchtime concert by the Barbican Quartet, Young Artists at St John Smith’s Square, the young ensemble pair Haydn’s radiant “Sunrise” Quartet Op. 76, No. 4 with Schubert’s transcendent final String Quartet No. 15.
Tomorrow evening, Vivaldi’s Mediterranean Four Seasons are paired with the sultry South American seasons of Astor Piazzolla (The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires). Tamsin Waley-Cohen appears as soloist. The evening concludes with late-night jazz from City Music Foundation artist Nishla Smith.
On Sunday, Joby Burgess brings a topical percussion programme of waste and renewal to Dartmoor, exploring our changing weather and ecology in Toru Takemitsu’s Seasons and combining African soda bottles and live looping in Gabriel Prokofiev’s Fanta to turn waste into music, in a programme that also includes works by Rebecca Dale and John Luther Adams. Burgess appears following a talk on local environment and conservation.
The Dartmoor weekend closes with Renaissance polyphony experts Stile Antico contrasting the earthly delights of pastoral Elizabethan madrigals with the heavenly gardens of the Bible’s Song of Songs, with a piece by composer-inresidence Huw Watkins.
Concerts over the weekend are to be held in Ashburton Arts Centre and Chagford, Widecombe, Ashburton and Hatherleigh Churches.
Tickets are available from twomoorsfestival.co.uk