The human voice as a powerful vehicle for storytelling: Music in the Round's Sheffield Chamber Music Festival 2026 guest curated by soprano Claire Booth

Claire Booth (centre) and Music in the Round

Stories and story-telling are at the heart of the 2026 Sheffield Chamber Music Festival, which runs from 15 to 23 May. Presented by Music in the Round, this year's festival is guest curated by soprano Claire Booth, bringing a focus on celebrating the human voice as a powerful vehicle for storytelling. 

The festival opens with Booth in Judith Weir's remarkable one-woman grand opera, King Harald's Saga, in an evening that also includes Birtwistle's theatrical Cortège and a chamber adaptation of Brahms' Serenade No. 1.  Festival favourites, the dawn and sunset recitals return with Baroque evocations of nightingales by Couperin to Messiaen’s transcriptions of wild birds at Dawn in Sheffield's General Cemetery and Weber’s Clarinet Quintet, Mozart’s Oboe Quartet and Korngold’s Piano Quintet at Sunset. The friendship of Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett is celebrated when Vicky Featherstone directs an evening featuring Feldman’s Samuel Beckett, Words and Music which was originally a radio play

Opera continues with Booth and pianist Christopher Glynn in Poulenc's one-act opera based on Jean Cocteau, La Voix Humaine, paired with settings of Cocteau's poetry. Booth and Glynn also decamp to the Chatsworth Estate and are joined by violinist Tamsin Waley-Cohen for an all-day event that combines Grieg's Violin Sonata and his song-cycle Haugtussa in the morning with songs by Percy Grainger and Gavin Higgins' recent song-cycle Speak of the North in the afternoon, interspersed with guided walks! And Booth will be joined by Waley-Cohen, back in Sheffield, for Kurtág's Kafka Fragments.

The closing day of the festival world features the premiere of Julian Phillips’ children’s opera Henny Penny performed by a choir of Sheffield primary school children, followed by an evening recital of Strauss’s Four Last Songs alongside a new work by Ellen Sargen, Strauss’s Sextet from Capriccio, Sibelius’s En Saga in a reconstruction of the original chamber version and Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll.   

 Other events at the festival include a visit from Gwilym Simcock and friends, Beethoven's Septet as well as an evening devoted to music by his contemporaries, a folk evening focused on birds and bird song

There is a relaxed concert featuring Claire Booth in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, as well as a family concert featuring Izzy Gizmo. And the Prokofiev along with Ravel and Debussy feature in an evening concert too, and there are songs without words from Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov, Brahms, Knussen and Dohnanyi.

 Full details from the festival website.