The sixty-fifth Cheltenham Music Festival begins on July 3rd, and with more than one hundred and fifty hours of live music to enjoy this year's concerts promise to be as vibrant and diverse as ever. The Festival attracts more than sixteen thousand visitors each year, with events ranging from free family workshops and projects for young artists to concerts by world-class musicians. The performances take place in a variety of venues, including the Town Hall, Pittville Pump Room, Gloucester Cathedral, Tewkesbury Abbey and the Everyman Theatre.
It is, of course, impossible to highlight everything with so much music to choose from, but a number of concerts have caught my eye. In celebration of the bicentenary of his birth, this year's Festival will be a treat for Mendelssohn fans. On July 6th, Ashley Wass plays the Piano Trio in D minor (as well as Shostakovich's second Piano Trio, a fraught work inspired by the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps). The following day, Wass returns to play a selection of Mendelssohn's exquisiteSongs without words and the spirited Piano Quartet in F minor.
On July 5th, the acclaimed Austrian pianist Till Fellner (currently in the middle of a three year, worldwide Beethoven sonata cycle) performs the composer's Sonata No. 5 in C minor, and if you're a fan of Jacques Loussier's jazzy take on classical tunes you'll enjoy hearing the acclaimed David Rees-Williams Trio play on July 8th. Radio 3's Discovering Music returns to the festival on July 13th, with an intriguing look at the musical and personal identities of Gustav Mahler (Piano Quartet in A minor) and Alfred Schnittke (Piano Quintet).
One of the highlights of this year's Festival will be hearing sixteen-year-old Pate's pupil Jonathan McNaught, winner of the 2009 Gloucestershire Young Musician competition, and Liz Faulkner, a Guildhall double bass student, on July 14th. Their programme includes music by Bach, Chopin, Handel, Schubert and Rachmaninov. On July 17th, twenty-year-old Royal College of Music student Mark Viner will give a recital which includes Alkan's mighty Symphony for Solo Piano, Haydn's Sonata in B minor (Hob. 16/32) and Schumann's Etudes Symphoniques.
Finally, on July 14th Angela Hewitt makes her debut at the Cheltenham Festival. Her reputation is in no small part built upon the music of JS Bach, which she has recorded for Hyperion. Her programme is centered around his English Suite No. 6 in D minor, and includes Handel's Suite No. 2 in F, Mendelssohn's Prelude and Fugue No. 1 in E minor and Variations Serieuses and Haydn's Sonata in E flat, Hob. 16/52. If you're not lucky enough to get tickets for this concert, she will be playing an all-Schumann programme at Malvern Theatres in November.
Tickets can be purchased online, or by calling the Festival box office on 0844 576 8970.
UPDATE:
Sky Arts has produced an eight minute film previewing this year's Festival, which you can watch here. Festival Director Meurig Bowen is filmed on location at Pittville Pump Room and the Town Hall. There are stunning shots of Cheltenham and the Cotswolds, and interviews with soprano Elizabeth Watts and the Endellion Quartet.
