Truth and beauty should always go together. Leos Janáček

Music is not there to please people it is there to disturb them. Pierre Boulez

My soul in hearing doth see Text from Handel’s German Arias

Music makes me forget myself, my real place; it transports me to some other place not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand, that I can do what I cannot do. Tolstoy - The Kreutzer Sonata

Celebrity Performers are nothing new. When the 21 year-old Handel arrived in Rome in 1706 he was housed in a Palace, given the choice of the best instruments, the best instrumentalists and the greatest singers that money could buy. Liszt, whose bicentenary falls this year, toured Europe in triumph, idolised by audiences. Enescu and Ysaÿe, Bach and Vivaldi, Beethoven and Mozart, Brahms and Mendelssohn, Bartók and Britten were all celebrated virtuoso composer-performers. That tradition lives on, this year the Festival brings you the violist-composer Brett Dean and ninety performers, some celebrated and some awaiting fame, from four continents in forty four events, music for every taste and performed in almost every chamber combination.

And this year the festival alphabet goes like this - armida abbandonata, brandenburg and britten, corelli, dean, enescu, fauré and gaspard, handel and haydn, irish and intimate, johann, kinsella, larcher, liszt and ligeti, mendelssohn, mansurian, mozart and myaskovsky, nonet, onslow, posadas, quartet and quintet, ravel, roussel, rachmaninov and razumovsky, schubert and schumann, telemann and tchaikovsky, ursuleasa, vanbrugh, webern, ysaÿe and zara.

View Full Programme >>