From Dante's Inferno to the End of Time: Lincolnshire International Chamber Music Festival returns in full force

After a socially distanced Festival last summer, Lincolnshire International Chamber Music Festival is returning to full force with a four-day festival running from 22 to 25 September 2022 in venues across the county. Composer/pianist Alissa Firsova is the festival's artistic director, and this year she and cellist Tim Hugh open the festival with a concert at Lincoln Minster School performing Rachmaninov, Arvo Pärt and Schubert.

Tim Hugh then joins the Navarra Quartet for Schubert's String Quintet at St James' Church, Louth in a programme that also includes a joint composition by Alissa Firsova and her parents, Dmitri Smirnov and Elena Firsova, taking the audience on a journey through Dante's nine circles of Hell, purgatory and the ten heavens of Paradise. And the music will be complemented by projections of art by the Philip Firsov, Alissa Firsova’s brother.

For The Voice of the Trumpet at St Wulfram's Church, Grantham, trumpeter Matilda Lloyd and organist David Bednall will give a varied programme moving from the Baroque to Romantic repertoire. For the festival's final concert at the County Assembly Rooms, Lincoln, Alissa Firsova joins Camerata RCO (made up of members of the  Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) for a programme that moves from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, to her own Reunion, written as a response to the COVID pandemic, to Hindemith's Clarinet Quartet, written as he was escaping Nazi Germany and which uses the same instrumental line-up as Messiaen's quartet.

The festival was founded in 2004 under the artistic directorship of Graham Oppenheimer, with Lincolnshire-born pianist Ashley Wass taking over as artistic director in 2007. Wass was later joined by violinist Matthew Trusler as co-artistic director, with Alissa Firsova becoming artistic director in 2019.