The English Music Festival at Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire over 27th – 30th May 2016, will be in celebratory mood as it launches its tenth Festival with the BBC Concert Orchestra under conductor Martin Yates on Friday 27th May 2016 at Dorchester Abbey, with world premières by Paul Lewis and David Matthews, tone poems by Delius, and Vaughan Williams’s Fat Knight; music from his opera, Sir John in Love, which is also a world première performance.
In keeping with the ethos of making lost British music available to everyone, the four-day programme contains a selection of suitably celebratory audience favourites and premières and will also feature performances of the complete extant music by composer George Butterworth, on the centenary of his death, in conjunction with Radley College on Thursday 26th and Friday 27th May.
The main evening concerts in Dorchester Abbey feature visits from the English Symphony Orchestra who will perform the Double Concerto by Percy Sherwood; the City of London Choir who perform Elgar Part Songs and Bliss’s Pastoral; Lie Strewn the White Flocks, and The Bath Philharmonia who debut at the Festival with a greatly anticipated first performance of Paul Carr’s Violin Concerto performed by Rupert Marshall-Luck.
The composer explained: “I have often found that being asked to write a particular work is the greatest source of inspiration, and this work is no exception. At the time Founder-Director Em Marshall-Luck suggested I might like to write a concerto for her husband, Rupert, I had in fact been suffering a period of creative depression so this invitation couldn’t have come at a better time and feeling challenged, but inspired by the idea, I completed the work in just five weeks.”
Other visitors to the Festival offering a varied selection of styles include traditional folk group, the Old Swan Band; the ever-popular New Foxtrot Serenaders with their take on British popular songs from stage, screen and wireless, and the Queens Six, who were recently featured on BBC Music magazine’s cover disc, singing early music. The award-winning Jaguar Land Rover Brass Band re-visit the Festival after their rousing performance a few years ago, and the 400th anniversary of the death of the Bard is recognised with a programme entitled Shakespeare in Song, from In Voice and Verse.
Intimate chamber recitals feature the melancholy beauty of composer Ian Venables played by cellist, Richard Jenkinson and pianist, Benjamin Frith as well as other solo performers taking part including Richard Edgar-Wilson and David Owen Norris in a Shakespeare-themed programme, and Kathryn Rudge and James Baillieu in songs by Elgar, Finzi, Warlock and Bridge.
A number of informative talks complete this year’s programme. A convenient mini-bus transfer is available to/from Didcot train station, Dorchester-on-Thames and other Festival venues.
For further information and to see the full programme, visit the Festival's website.