Now entering its second decade, The English Music Festival has developed to become one the UK’s leading festivals, with a reputation for bringing to the concert platform overlooked works by British composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as championing contemporary composers.
Its four day main event, which takes place over the second May Bank Holiday weekend, brings a host of concerts, recitals and talks to Dorchester-on-Thames in Oxfordshire. Its principal venue is the twelfth century Abbey, with events also taking place at Radley College and in the church of All Saints in nearby Sutton Courtenay. It is privileged to have had the decade long endorsement of the BBC Concert Orchestra, whose presentation of the opening night’s concert is broadcast on Radio 3; and, alongside this, it presents a wealth of music in a variety of genres, including solo instrumental recitals, chamber music, solo song, early music, and dance band music from the 1920s to the 1940s. These are presented by world class musicians: alongside the BBC Concert Orchestra, our artists have included the Carducci Quartet, Kathryn Rudge, Janice Watson, Roderick Williams, David Wilson-Johnson, the Orchestra of the Swan, and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra.
The English Music Festival has become highly regarded for its world premiere performances, and, in recent years, these have included the first performances of new discoveries by Bliss, Britten, Delius, Gurney, Howells, Stanford and Vaughan Williams. Alongside these, a number of contemporary composers have also been well represented over the course of the Festival’s history, with works by such composers as Francis Pott, John Pickard and Richard Blackford being heard for the first time at the English Music Festival. Indeed, the Festival has also been active in commissioning new works: during the last ten years, two concerts have been held consisting entirely of such premieres, and a number of them are presented on CD, on a double-disc set recorded for the English Music Festival's own record label, EM Records.
EM Records and its sister arm, EM Publishing, aim to continue and enhance the work that the English Music Festival performs through its annual festival. By means of our recordings, which are distributed worldwide, the music that we and our artists discover can be brought to a wider audience in a lasting, permanent format. Our publishing house issues scholarly critical scores, prepared using the highest standards of modern scholarship, and this enables other musicians to access the scores of these works – many of them have hitherto remained in manuscript form, held in libraries or in private ownership, which can make public access difficult –to study them, and to include them in their own concert programmes, thereby helping to establish them in the repertoire.