English Music Festival 2008 – Booking opens

Booking opens this week for the second English Music Festival (Oxfordshire, 23-27 May 2008), a major celebration of Britain’s unique and diverse musical heritage.

Leading British and international artists, including the acclaimed violinist Philippe Graffin, counter-tenor James Bowman, the Carducci Quartet, and the BBC Concert Orchestra under conductor Barry Wordsworth, will perform music by composers from the Middle Ages to the present day, including several world premieres.

The Festival comprises 19 concerts and events over five days, in venues ranging from Dorchester Abbey in Dorchester-on-Thames to the Chapel of Keble College Oxford, the Silk Hall and Chapel at Radley College near Abingdon, and historic All Saints Church, Sutton Courtenay – final resting place of the great English novelist George Orwell.

With no fewer than four premieres by Britten, and several by Holbrooke, ‘the Cockney Wagner’, the Festival will also include a concert of new compositions by contemporary British composers, specially commissioned by the EMF.

In other concerts, familiar and well-loved pieces such as Parry’s Jerusalem, Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia and Elgar’s Serenade will be linked with exquisite rare works such as Holbrooke’s Birds of Rhiannon, Rawsthorne’s Practical Cats, Bliss’s Pastoral, Norman O’Neill’s unpublished Pastorale, Elgar’s Banner of St George and Bantock’s Celtic Symphony, as well as music by earlier British composers such as Linley and Arne.

Tickets for the English Music Festival are on sale now. They are available online or by phone from Tickets Oxford at the Oxford Playhouse, www.oxfordplayhouse.com , tel: 01865 305305.

Check out the Festival website, www.englishmusicfestival.org.uk, for the full programme and details of the EMF Friends scheme (which offers discounts on tickets and a range of other membership benefits).