Tuesday 11 April 2023

Handel, G&S, Roald Dahl and more: Lichfield Festival 2023

Grimethorpe Colliery Band in Lichfield Cathedral
Grimethorpe Colliery Band in Lichfield Cathedral

This year's Lichfield Festival runs from 6 to 16 July 2023 and features music of all kinds, from folk to classical, jazz to gospel, plus theatre, literary, community and family events. The classical programme includes the Liberata Collective and Ensemble Hesperi in Handel’s opera Orlando with period instruments, and Charles Court Opera in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado. For younger audiences there is Waterperry Opera’s music theatre version of Roald Dahl’s Little Red Riding Hood and The Three Little Pigs.

Visitors include the Brodsky Quartet, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney, BBC National Orchestra of Wales and conductor Ryan Bancroft in Berlioz and Sibelius, Grimethorpe Colliery Band, violinist Rachel Podger, and pianist Danny Driver. Lizzie Ball, violin and Miloš Milivojević, accordion present Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky: A Musical Portrait, whilst festival Patron Julian Lloyd Webber hosts and curates Bach by Candlelight, with his cellist wife Jiaxin Lloyd Webber, to close this year’s Festival.   
A mini-season It’s a Drag looks at gender and cross-dressing in theatre, opera and the arts. Author Janet Tennant and guests investigate this long tradition, mezzo soprano Polly Leech sings operatic 'trouser roles', and vocalist and associate artist Jessica Walker takes a cross-dressing musical tour through the decades.

Other events include The Lord Chamberlain’s Men in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet on the Cathedral Lawn in the way Shakespeare would have first seen it – with an all-male cast, in the open air, and with Elizabethan costume, music and dance - chant, music and dance of the Tibetan Monks of the Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, master musicians N’famady Kouyaté and Gasper Nali who fuse African, jazz, pop and indie elements, and Kabantu who play and improvise folk music from around the globe.    

Full details from the Lichfield Festival website.

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