SOPRANO Hilary Cronin comes Dorset and Somerset for the October series of Concerts in the West on 4th and 5th October. Hilary, who was selected by BBC Music Magazine as a Rising Star of 2022, having won both first prize and the audience award at the 2021 Handel Singing Competition, is accompanied by Asako Ozawa….
BOURNEMOUTH Chamber Music Society celebrates its 80th anniversary in the 2024-25 season, opening with a recital by Jiaxin, the cellist wife of the celebrated cello virtuoso Julian Lloyd Webber, on 20th October at the usual time of 3pm at Kimmeridge House on the Bournemouth University Talbot campus. The society made its debut on the local…
CONCERTS in the West, the charity which brings rising stars of the chamber music scene to the West Country, opens the autumn season with four recitals by the Mela guitar quartet, bringing a “festival of music” to Bridport Arts Centre on Friday 6th September at 11.30am, for the shorter coffee concert, that evening at Ilminster…
HOT on the heels of his televised efforts at conducting Vivaldi in Venice, the barrister, judge and television presenter Rob Rinder will be a special guest at this year’s Purbeck Chamber Music Festival, in conversation with festival artistic director, Natalie Clein, on Friday 30th August. The music-loving lawyer and polymath will be discussing with the…
THE last of the summer’s opera and music festivals, If Opera at Bradford on Avon, runs this year from 23rd to 31st August, and brings two of the greatest operas in the repertoire to eager audiences. Spawned by the original Iford Arts Festival, which ran at Iford Manor from the 1980s to 2018, If Opera…
VIRTUOSO musicians, led by violinist David Juritz, return to Burton Bradstock in August for the Dorset seaside village’s annual festival of music and art. The festival runs from Saturday 10th to Sunday 18th, with the annual art exhibition in the village hall throughout the week, and music, mainly in St Mary’s Church, from Sunday to…
IF your thoughts go north of the border at the mention of “the Fringe” you clearly haven’t discovered the Shaftesbury Fringe, a weekend of entertainment, comedy, music, dance, theatre, cabaret, poetry, eccentricity and all-round original creativity. This year’s Shaftesbury Fringe, running over four days, from Thursday 25th to Sunday 28th July, features a massive line-up…
STORIES don’t come much more melodramatic or gory than Sweeney Todd, a popular penny dreadful-style tale of Victorian times, made famous for a new generation by Stephen Sondheim with his brilliant musical re-creation of the story of the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Now comic opera specialists Opera Della Luna come to Bath Theatre Royal…
OPERA in beautiful rural settings is now almost as much part of the English summer (whatever the weather) as the village fete and strawberries and cream. The tiny village of Oborne near Sherborne has quietly but steadily been developing its own mini opera festival, and this year, from Friday 26th July to Sunday 4th August…
CERNE Abbas Music Festival, established in 1991 as a relaxed but high quality celebration of the chamber music repertoire, takes a new direction this year, with a new venue and an inaugural autumn series. Most concerts for this year’s festival, from Friday 12th to Sunday 14th July, will be in the usual venue, the village’s…