This year’s classical music programme features international artists and award-winning actors performing works inspired by Guest Director, musician, DJ and broadcaster, Nabihah Iqbal’s love of folk music; William Shakespeare; and even spiritual journeys.
Explore some of this year’s highlights below or browse the full programme here.
Folk pieces
The captivating Yuja Wang joins London Symphony Orchestra for a performance of Magnus Lindberg’s new Piano Concerto No.3, led by pioneering French conductor Francois-Xavier Roth. A three-movement work written especially for Wang, it is a dramatic and flamboyant piece, designed to showcase her stunning virtuosity at the piano. The concert ends with a performance of Beethoven’s evergreen Pastoral Symphony.
World-leading ensemble Britten Sinfonia perform Vaughan Williams’s beloved The Lark Ascending, featuring the Brighton Festival Chorus, led by Adam Hickox, son of renowned conductor Richard Hickox. The concert includes a world premiere of new work from British composer Joseph Phibbs and Brighton-born Frank Bridge’s folk-inflected There is a Willow Grows Aslant a Brook alongside Vaughan Williams’ lesser known yet pertinent plea for peace, Dona nobis pacem.
Reflecting the growing ambition of our music education hub, Create Music, Brighton & East Sussex Youth Orchestra will perform a series of folk and dance-inspired pieces in a concert put together with mentoring support from members of the London Symphony Orchestra. The region’s finest young musicians play Doreen Carwithen’s Suffolk Suite and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Elgar’s achingly nostalgic Cello Concerto will also be performed by prize-winning young Polish cellist Maciej Kułakowski.
Musical mantras, man and miracles
The multi-award-winning Takács Quartet return to Brighton Festival from their base in Colorado, bringing together musicians from Hungary, Britain and America. In an afternoon concert at Glyndebourne, Arvo Pärt’s Summa offers a musical mantra and is performed in company with a pair of quartets by Schubert that span two important times in the composer's life.
Two of the UK’s finest recitalists, tenor Mark Padmore and baritone Roderick Williams, join actors Rory Kinnear and Pandora Colin and peerless pianist Julius Drake for a programme of words and music inspired by Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man. For poetry lovers, the performance will also include recitals of Donne, Yeats and Carol Ann Duffy, alongside music from Purcell and Schubert and Copland and Barber, via Frank Bridge and Benjamin Britten.
Virtuoso a cappella choral group Tenebrae sing Joby Talbot’s dazzlingly polystylistic Path of Miracles. A vocal tour de force, the piece evokes both the physical challenges of the pilgrims’ path to Santiago de Compostela and the spiritual rewards upon arrival at St James’s shrine.
Click here for the full Classical Music programme and to buy your tickets.
