The English Music Festival celebrates the brilliance, innovation, beauty and rich musical heritage of Britain with a strong focus on unearthing overlooked or forgotten masterpieces of the late nineteenth to mid twentieth century. The sixteenth Festival opens in Dorchester Abbey, Oxfordshire on 26 May and will run until the evening of 29 May 2023, with a highly anticipated visit by the BBC Concert Orchestra on opening night to perform major works by EJ Moeran and Ralph Vaughan Williams, as well as world premières by William Lloyd Webber, William Alwyn and Paul Lewis. Concerts continue at Dorchester Abbey, Radley College Silk Hall and at All Saints' Church, Sutton Courtenay, with a minibus transfer provided between venues.
For the Festival’s opening concert, English Music Festival patrons will be making a special pilgrimage to Dorchester Abbey to hear a rare live performance of EJ Moeran’s glorious Cello Concerto when soloist Raphael Wallfisch joins the BBC Concert Orchestra with conductor Martin Yates. Moeran’s biographer, Dr Ian Maxwell, sets the context to this marginalised yet much loved work in his pre-concert talk.
The opening concert includes no fewer than four premières: Paul Lewis’s A Celebratory Overture; William Lloyd Webber’s Scenes from Childhood (realised by Martin Yates) and William Alwyn’s orchestral Serenade. The evening’s celebration ends in suitably joyous and characterful style, when Adrian Williams’s Symphonic Fantasy, adapted and arranged from Vaughan Williams’s opera The Poisoned Kiss, will be given a first live performance.
Live choral music is to feature in two major programmes this year. The Godwine Choir and The Holst Orchestra conducted by Hilary Davan Wetton bring a programme of popular favourites by George Dyson, Cecil Armstrong Gibbs, Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland and Gustav Holst together with Herbert Howells’s Requiem and Elgar’s sparkling Introduction and Allegro; while the vocal ensemble The Strand Consort with their conductor Joseph Fort end the Festival in celebration of the Coronation of Charles III with works including Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor, Hubert Parry’s I was Glad, and John Ireland’s The Hills.
The Festival’s increasing international activity will be recognised by the presence of artists from across the world coming to Oxfordshire. The brilliant South African pianist Peter Cartwright will join the violinist Rupert Marshall-Luck in a showcase of music including works by Herbert Howells, Frederick Delius, Gustav Holst and John Ireland, and world premières by Robin Milford and Richard Blackford.
Composers Madeleine Dring, Herbert Howells, York Bowen and Malcolm Arnold are represented in a vibrant and varied programme for flute, oboe and piano when the French-Italian ensemble of Nicolas Vallette, Marika Lombardi and Agnès Bonjean take to the stage; while a particular highlight of the Festival’s late-evening concerts will be the superb young Portuguese guitarist Fábio Fernandes, who will present music for lute and guitar, demonstrating both the range and versatility of these instruments and the imagination with which British composers have written for them across the centuries.
Tenor Nick Pritchard and pianist Sholto Kynoch will present two of the most distinctive song cycles by British composers: Gerald Finzi’s Hardy-inspired A Young Man’s Exhortation and John Ireland’s Housman setting The Land of Lost Content; with songs by Ethel Smyth and Frederick Delius providing a perfect complement.
Soprano Sara Stowe and pianist Charles Wiffen provide an opportunity to hear songs by Walter Leigh, amongst others, in their showcase of song; and a different tradition is celebrated by the British folk band Moonrakers, who will perform ancient mystical ballads, evocative and lyrical tunes and joyous chorus songs as well as their own compositions.
Simon Callaghan presents an opportunity to hear rarely heard piano works by Rebecca Clarke, Cyril Scott, George Dyson and Lord Berners, in his recital, and The Guards Association Band will perform such favourites as Malcolm Arnold’s exuberant English Dances, the imposing Suite from Things to Come by Arthur Bliss, Edward Elgar’s much-loved Salut d’Amour and Eric Coates’s bustling Knightsbridge.
The English Music Festival's late evening concerts are a special feature of the Festival, the intimate warmth of Dorchester Abbey providing the perfect setting for audiences to relax and enjoy the lighter side of British composers. This year, 7 piece dance band The New Foxtrot Serenaders make a welcome return to showcase the verve, comedy and pathos that imbues the golden age of dance band music.
Find other concerts featuring at the English Music Festival on Concert Diary.