English Music Festival to feature new work in the Yorkshire Dales

The English Music Festival opens next week with concerts and music performances in several venues including Simonstone Hall Hotel and Bolton Castle.

The four-day festival launches at 6pm on Thursday, October 4, with a soiree at the hotel. One of the highlights of the four-day festival will be a performance at St Andrew’s Church in Aysgarth next Friday, featuring films which the EMF commissioned from the Yorkshire Film Archive.

It comprises scenes from archive films in black and white and early colour, showing towns and villages in the dales, including Aysgarth, Castle Bolton, Bainbridge, Hawes, Hardraw and Richmond, and people going about their daily lives.

The films will be accompanied by performances of the winning musical entries from the festival’s film music competition. The contest was open to young composers under 30 and is an opportunity for them to have their work performed.

The work will be performed by three internationally highly-acclaimed professional solo and chamber musicians; pianist Duncan Honeybourne, violinist Rupert Marshall-Luck and cellist Joseph Spooner, all of whom have performed and made recordings worldwide with top orchestras, record labels and collaborative musicians.

The English Music Festival was founded in 2004 to give a platform to work by British composers, primarily of the late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, which for many years have been rarely heard.

In the past the festival has staged the first performances of previously-overlooked work by composers including Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Programmes span from mediaeval music through to contemporary.

The main festival is held in Oxfordshire, but it will be the third time the festival has been staged in the Yorkshire Dales. The Little White Bus Company will run special services to venues. Booked online at littlewhitebus.co.uk.

For more details visit englishmusicfestival.org.uk.