BURTON Bradstock’s arts festival is renowned for the wide spectrum of music played by ensembles and soloists, led by violinist and artistic director David Juritz, alongside an exhibition of West Country arts, ceramics and crafts in the historic village hall. This year’s 44th annual festival runs from 15th to 23rd August.
The majority of the music programme is based in the village’s beautiful St Mary’s Church, but the festival music starts with the now-traditional tea party in the rectory gardens, on Sunday 16th, followed by festival evensong in the church.
Musical polymath David Gordon, a composer, jazz pianist and one of the UK’s most in-demand harpsichordists, opens the main programme as the Castaway, at St Mary’s on Tuesday 18th at 11.30am, talking about his unusual and varied career – as well as studying logic.
The 7pm concert on Tuesday features Amelia Coburn, known as the “folk-horror songstress”, who hails from Middlesborough on Teeside. Her honest, occasionally hilarious and quintessentially north-eastern persona disarms and beguiles in equal measure. Drawing inspiration from gothic literature and the shadowy allure of film noir, there is a darkness at the heart of many of her songs, populated by vivid characters and nocturnal creatures that inhabit the liminal space “between the moon and the milkman”.
There is a late night (9.45pm) concert with the trio of Craig Ogden, guitar, David Juritz, violin and Milos Milivojevic, accordion, in a programme called Monks, a Monastery and a Pilgrim, featuring music from Dowland to contemporary composer Carlo Domeniconi.
Wednesday’s lunchtime concert with picnic platter in the rectory gardens is already sold out, but at the time of writing there may still be some tickets for the evening’s jazz concert, with singer and tap dancer Lucy Dixon and Christian Garrick, the country’s finest jazz violinist (and a Dorset favourite from many Artsreach tours with his Budapest Cafe Orchestra). The late-night recital features husband and wife Natalia Lomeiko, violin, and Yuri Zhislin, viola and their pianist daughter Anya Zhislin.
At noon on Thursday, 20th, Songs and Dances features six festival musicians playing works by Malcolm Arnold, Gershwin, Ravel and Otto Mortensen. The
Festival Players’ evening concert includes quintets by Sam Reider, Hans Gal and Mozart. The Festival Players also join David Gordon, piano, percussionist Paul Cavaciuti and Sandy Burnett, bass, for a romp through musical time – including Dowland, de Falla and Miles Davis.
The concluding gala concert, on Friday at 7pm in St Mary’s, has the full festival orchestra playing Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, Sweeney’s accordion concerto “Winter”, Vivaldi’s concerto for four violins in B minor, Glazunov’s Meditation and de Falla’s Suite No 1 from The Three-Cornered Hat.
The art exhibition, from 15th to 23rd August, is put together by a small committee, this year led by Liz Orza, who has succeeded the long-time chairman Wendy Hart. The revenue from the sale of the art and crafts in the show goes towards funding the festival and to support art education workshops in the local area.