Holst 150, complete Shostakovich quartets, Gilbert & Sullivan's The Sorcerer: Lichfield Festival 2024

The Hub at St Mary's - Brodsky Quartet at Lichfield Festival, July 2023 (Photo: Tyler Whiting)

The Lichfield Festival returns for ten days of classical, folk, world, jazz, cabaret and popular music, theatre, dance and the written word from 4 to 14 July 2024. The 2024 festival opens with Rachel Podger (violin) and her ensemble Brecon Baroque in Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.  

A 150th anniversary celebration of Gustav Holst includes Egdon Heath from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Ryan Bancroft (along with Brahms and Elgar's Cello Concerto) and the Carice Singers’ Stargazers programme includes Holst's The Evening Watch. And there will be Holst arrangements from BBC Folk Musician of the Year Will Pound and percussionist Delia Stevens. 

Pianist Danny Driver plays two recitals, closing the Festival with candle-lit Bach in the Cathedral.  Other chamber music highlights are the complete Shostakovich quartets from Brodsky Quartet spread over a single weekend, Oz Clarke and Armonico Consort’s light-hearted look at music and wine A Second Sip, and a late night concert by 2024 RPS Instrumental award-winning sitar player Jasdeep Singh Degun.  

Recorder quartet Palisander’s historical concert experience follows the wives of Henry VIII in Divorced, Beheaded, Died, and still in an historical bent, Lesley Smith presents the story of Mary Queen of Scots in full Elizabethan costume, and and The Lord Chamberlain’s Men perform Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the open air, in period costume, with an all-male cast, just as it would have been in Elizabeth I’s day.  

The popular Midlands Choir of the Year returns with the final taking place in the Cathedral.  For younger audiences, Waterperry Opera returns with Peter and The Wolf, and music, art and drama projects on the theme of Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons take place with local schools for this year’s Aspire! community and participation programme.

All that, plus 10 young artist concerts and Charles Court Opera’s latest G&S production The Sorcerer, not to mention the Festival Fireworks which are FREE to all at Beacon Park on Friday 12 July, in collaboration with Fuse/Lichfield Arts.

Full details from the festival website.

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

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.

Celebrating 40 years: The Lichfield Festival 2022 with a new 40-part motet by Thomas Hyde and Stephen McNeff's new opera

Lichfield Cathedral lit for an event at the 2018 Festival

This year the Lichfield Festival, artistic director Damian Thantrey, celebrates its 40th anniversary with eleven days of events from 7 to 17 July 2022. The festival's classical music programme includes a several works from that first festival along with works celebrating the 150th anniversary of RVW's birth.

The anniversary centrepiece is a 40-voice choral concert in Lichfield Cathedral featuring From Silence, a new commission by Thomas Hyde with text by Alexander McCall Smith, plus RVW's Mass in G minor and Tallis’ Spem in Alium performed by the Carice Singers and Pieces of Eight, together with the Gentlemen of the Cathedral Choir.  The festival associate orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales will be performing RVW's Fantasia on a theme of Thomas Tallis (which featured in 1982) plus music by Britten and Schumann.

The cathedral is also the venue for Ballet Cymru's new production Dream, and for the finale of the Midland Choir of the Year Competition to showcase of the finest Midlands-based amateur singing groups.

There will be a performance of Stephen McNeff’s new chamber opera Beyond the Garden (which was premiered in Slovenia) based on the life of Alma Mahler, and featuring mezzo-soprano Susan Bickley. Whilst Charles Court Opera will be performing Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience.

There are recital appearances from cellist Steven Isserlis and guitarist Paul Galbraith, pianist Danny Driver (one of the festival's new associate artists), and the Brodsky Quartet. The festival's Young Artist series continues with a whopping ten recitals, and a former young artist, horn play Ben Goldscheider returns to perform RVW and Brahms with the Goldfield Ensemble.

There are fireworks, dance, spoken word, lectures, poetry and much much more, including the Lord Chamberlain's Men in an all-male staging of Shakespeare's As you like it.

Full details from the festival website.