Celebrating 10 years - Wimbledon International Music Festival

This year's Wimbledon International Music Festival celebrates the festival's 10th anniversary. Running from 10-25 November 2018, the festival includes visits from Imogen Cooper, the Takacs Quartet, the Brodsky Quartet, Williard White and Peter Donohoe. The festival was founded, and is still directed by Anthony Wilkinson and this year they will be presenting one of the films which Anthony directed, The Music of Exile, on the life and music of Martinu with a narration written by writer and composer Anthony Burgess.

Chamber music is a strong feature of this year's festival. Things open with the Brodsky Quartet in Haydn's Seven Last Words, inerwoven with sitar and tabla meditations from Roppa Panesar (sitar) and Gurdain Rayatt (tabla), and Gesualdo's Responsories sung by Tenebrae Consort. The Chineke! Ensemble will be bringing a programme of chamber music which includes works by two black musicians, the 18th century Guadaloupe-born French composer Chevalier de Saint-George and the English composer (and pupil of Stanford) Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, alongside Beethoven's Septet, whilst the Takacs Quartet brings a programme of Mozart' Bartok and Brahms. The Dante Quartet will be performing four Beethoven late quartetes and the Grosse Fuge across two concerts in one day.

Willard White will be joining the Brodsky Quartete for a programme which includes songs by Gershwin, Copland, Britten, Kern, Johnny Mercer and Frank Sinatra. And Matthew Best conducts the Academy Choir and Baroque Players in Handel's Messiah with Rowan Pierce, David Alsopp, James Gilchrist and James Newby. The festival ends with Robin O'Neill conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra in a programme of Webern, Schumann and Beethoven.

Full details from the Wimbledon International Music Festival website.