Burton Bradstock celebrates a vast spectrum of music with the 44th annual music festival, running this year from 16th to 21st August, the heart of a nine day festival, which includes an exhibition of art and ceramics from the south west at the historic village hall.
The music programme, led by the artistic director, violinist David Juritz, is based in the village’s beautiful St Mary’s Church, but the festival music starts with the now-traditional tea party in the rectory gardens, on Sunday 16th, followed by festival evensong in the church.
Musical polymath David Gordon, a composer, jazz pianist and one of the UK’s most in-demand harpsichordists, opens the main programme as the Castaway, at St Mary’s on Tuesday 18th at 11.30am, talking about his unusual and varied career—and studying logic.
The 7pm concert features the “folk-horror songstress” Amelia Coburn, who hails from Middlesborough on Teeside, whose honest, occasionally hilarious and quintessentially north-eastern persona disarms and beguiles in equal measure. Drawing inspiration from gothic literature and the shadowy allure of film noir, there is a darkness at the heart of many of her songs, populated by vivid characters and nocturnal creatures that inhabit the liminal space “between the moon and the milkman”.
The late night (9.45pm) concert has the trio of Craig Ogden, guitar, David Juritz, violin and Milos Milivojevic, accordion in a programme called Monks, a Monastery and a Pilgrim with music from Dowland to contemporary composer Carlo Domeniconi.
Wednesday’s lunchtime concert with picnic platter in the rectory gardens is already sold out, but at the time of writing there are still tickets for the evening’s jazz concert, featuring singer and tap dancer Lucy Dixon and the country’s finest jazz violinist Christian Garrick, and a late-night recital with husband and wife Natalia Lomeiko, violin, and Yuri Zhislin, viola and their pianist daughter Anya Zhislin.
At noon on Thursday, Songs and Dances features six festival musicians playing works by Malcolm Arnold, Gershwin, Ravel and Otto Mortensen. The Festival Players’ evening concert includes quintets by Sam Reider, Hans Gal and Mozart. The Festival Players also join David Gordon, piano, percussionist Paul Cavaciuti and Sandy Burnett, bass, for a romp through musical time—including Dowland, de Falla and Miles Davis.
The concluding gala concert, on Friday at 7pm in St Mary’s, has the full festival orchestra playing Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, Sweeney’s accordion concerto “Winter”, Vivaldi’s concerto for four violins in B minor, Glazunov’s Meditation and de Falla’s Suite No 1 from The Three-Cornered Hat.
The art exhibition, from 15th to 23rd August, is put together by a small committee, this year led by Liz Orza, who has succeeded the long-time chairman Wendy Hart. The revenue from the sale of the art and crafts in the show goes towards funding the festival and to support art education workshops in the local area.
