COVENT Garden Dance this year celebrates its 20th anniversary of presenting world-class ballet and dance. Since 2009 it has produced Ballet Under the Stars, the “Glyndebourne of dance”, a highly anticipated date in the south Wiltshire calendar, in the beautiful 17th century Dutch walled garden at Hatch House near Tisbury. This year’s Ballet at Hatch,…
THE 2026 Dorset Opera Festival brings one of the great tragic dramas of the repertoire to the stage of the Coade Hall at Bryanston School, and the return of a favourite comic opera from 21st to 25th July. There are performances of Saint-Saens’ Samson et Dalila on Wednesday 22nd and Thursday 23rd at 7pm, and…
IFORD Opera – now If Opera – celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, from 6th to 16th August, returning for a second year to Church Farm, Wingfield, near Bradford-on-Avon, with a programme which combines wit, tragic drama, Viennese sparkle, baroque boozing and the golden age of jazz and swing. The opening night, Thursday 6th August,…
CERNE Abbas, with its (in)famous chalk giant, has for 35 years been the setting for one of the region’s most delightful boutique chamber music festivals. This July, founder, Dorset-born clarinettist Richard Hosford brings a group of internationally renowned musicians back to the village for three concerts in the historic St Mary’s Church. Originally based around…
FROME celebrates the 25th anniversary of its multi-arts festival this year – and the festival opens on 3rd July, just two days after the funeral of Martin Bax, the actor, former town and district councillor and mayor, who became one of Frome’s most loved and valued citizens. A former actor with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Martin…
BEST-selling novelist, playwright and scriptwriter Chris Chibnall is one of the big draws at this year’s 29th Beaminster Festival. One of Dorset’s prettiest towns has an eclectic and stimulating programme, from 27th June to 5th July, including Chris Chibnall, superstar folk duo Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman, actress and singer Lucy Stevens as the great…
JULIUS Caesar is centre stage at Grange Opera Festival, where Sarah Brady (pictured) captures the magnetic power of Cleopatra. Christian Curnyn, well-known to local opera lovers from the former Iford Opera Festival (near Bath), conducts his Early Opera Company to accompany the singers, led by countertenor Tim Mead, as Caesar. One of Handel’s most popular…
CHALKE History Festival, the UK’s leading celebration of history, will return from 22nd to 28th June to bring the past vividly to life through a rich programme of top-class talks, wide-ranging discussions and dynamic living history experiences. The line-up includes classicist Mary Beard, radio presenter and journalist James Naughtie, commentator Anne Applebaum, former White House…
THE Irish seem to have a closer relationship with the mystical, the spiritual … the “other side” than many nations. All the Celtic peoples have their mystical side but the Irish have held on to their mythology more, perhaps because the Romans never conquered them. Maggie O’Farrell was born in Coleraine, in Co Londonderry, and…
WITH each day and each latest horrifying news item, the war in the Middle East becomes more worrying and spreads ever further. It is, for those who take the “long view” as Jonathan Freedland calls it in his BBC Radio 4 programmes, a war that was always on the cards, in a region that has…