A YOUNG bassoon player from Wincanton is one of two musicians named as Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s next BSO Young Associates. Kamilla Kovacs (pictured right) and Bristol-based oboist Lucy Keeley will begin making music in hospitals, schools, community centres and more, when they join Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO) as BSO Young Associates this month. The Young…
YOU can’t get away from the festive onslaught of Christmas gift suggestions – from starry television adverts to glossy magazine supplements, there are more ideas for presents than you can shake the proverbial stick at. But nothing beats an original object, something produced with skill and passion by a true craftsperson. Many galleries in the…
SHAFTESBURY-based musician Karen Wimhurst will be joining her Pagoda Project partners, accordionist Paul Hutchinson and fiddler and vocalist Hannah Cumming, for two performances on home turf on 19th and 20th November. They will be at Ilminster’s newest arts centre, the Millhouse, on Thursday at 8pm, and at Mere United Reformed Church on Friday at 7pm….
IN 2018, Sally Cookson and the Bristol Old Vic company devised a play from Patrick Ness’s 2011 young adults book A Monster Calls, with Adam Peck as the “writer in the room.” They took the fantastic presence of the imaginary Monster living in the ancient yew tree and brought his intervention to vivid theatrical life….
BEAMINSTER-based chamber choir Parnham Voices will perform a programme of love songs drawn from four centuries for its autumn concert at All Saints Church, Wyke Regis, on Saturday 14th November at 7pm. The Course of True Love, conducted by Mark Burstow, who became the choir’s director earlier this year, runs from Elizabethan madrigals by Morley,…
TS Eliot’s 1937 verse play Murder in the Cathedral was created as a site-specific event, performed where the action is set, in Canterbury Cathedral. When Tom Littler, director of the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, decided on a 2026 production, he moved the setting across the road into the church of St John the Divine,…
THE life of a remarkable West Country woman, whose story deserves to be better known, will be revealed in a talk with music at Ilminster Arts Centre, on Friday 27th November. Wadham is a familiar name in education circles, locally with Wadham School at Crewkerne, and nationally with Wadham College, Oxford, the first college at…
WE are accustomed to murder mysteries where all the characters have motives for murder, but Rick Abbot’s play But Why Bump Off Barnaby?, chosen by Mere Amateur Drama Society for the next production, comes at the dastardly deed from a different angle. When Barnaby Folcey is murdered at the Marlgate Manor family gathering, it really is…
DORCHESTER Drama tackles one of the masterpieces of the great Norwegian dramatist, Henrik Ibsen, An Enemy of the People, updated and reimagined from 1882 to 2009. The group’s autumn production is at the Corn Exchange on Friday 20th and Saturday 21st November at 2.30pm and 7.30pm. The performers are having fun with the generally serious…
HERE are 36 productions featuring 24 traditional pantomimes and Christmas stories on offer in the south and west region this year, and the first one, Arthur, starts at Bath’s Egg on 19th November and runs to 3rd January. Again the line-up is a mixture of the familiar and the new, with several book and film…