The Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts

The Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts celebrates its twenty-fifth anniversary in August 2007. The Festival will promote over thirty events of which sixteen are concerts, with complimentary events to include talks, composers in conversation, exhibitions, poetry readings, children’s shows and a guided walk. Among the venues to be used are St Andrew’s Church in Presteigne, the jewel in the festival’s crown with its exquisite acoustic, and village churches and halls nestling in the beautiful countryside of the surrounding Welsh Marches.

The Festival is honoured to welcome senior Australian musical figure Peter Sculthorpe as composer-in-residence; he will be represented with a wide variety of orchestral, chamber and instrumental works, and will be a major part of this year’s Australian theme. There is also a Percy Grainger 125th birthday concert, an exhibition of paintings by the late Sidney Nolan, performances of other Australian composers and by Australian performers. Another musical strand is the celebratory series of chamber and orchestral masterworks pieces by such composers as Bartók, Beethoven, Brahms, Britten, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert and Schumann.

The Presteigne Festival has a well-earned reputation for the performance and promotion of contemporary music; regularly nominated and in 2003 short listed for a Royal Philharmonic Society Music Award. This year, the Festival has commissioned no fewer than fifteen of today’s finest British composers to celebrate the silver jubilee and also George Vass’s fifteenth year as artistic director: Michael Berkeley, Joe Duddell, Peter Fribbins, John Hymas, Gabriel Jackson, John Joubert, Christopher Lyndon Gee, David Matthews, John McCabe, Cecilia McDowall, Joseph Phibbs, Lynne Plowman, Hilary Tann, Huw Watkins and Hugh Wood. Other living composers to be performed include Richard Rodney Bennett, Henri Dutilleux, Mark Anthony Turnage and Carl Vine.

The artist list for 2007 includes some of the finest musicians from the UK and beyond: the Psophos Quartet (BBC New Generation Artists), Huw Watkins (piano), Sara Trickey (violin), Sarah-Jane Bradley (viola), Alice Neary (cello), Gretel Dowdeswell (piano), Lucy Wakeford (harp), Carole Cerasi (harpsichord), Amy Dickson (saxophone), Virginia Shaw (oboe), Kathryn Thomas (flute), Catriona Scott (clarinet), the City of Canterbury Chamber Choir and the Presteigne Festival Orchestra - hand-picked from some of the UK’s finest young professionals.

Brochures giving full details of the complete

listings will be available at the beginning of May from:

Presteigne Festival of Music and the Arts Limited

P O Box 30, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2AW

Telephone: 01544 267800

www.presteignefestival.com

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