HSBC Cheltenham Music Festival
2–17 July 2010
Listen to Sound Mind at Music 2010…
Sound Mind was a series of events focussing on music, the brain and the mind.
This series coincided with the anniversary year of three composers who were deeply affected by mental instability — Gesualdo, Schumann and Wolf. Here’s your chance to get a feel for the series:
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Shivers down the spine: the science of the musical brain
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The Sound of Melancholia
For more information about further initiatives to bring biomedical science to life across the festivals, please visit LabOratory.
In the press — interviews and articles…
- Classic FM Arts Daily podcasts:
- Iestyn Davies & Fretwork/New London Chamber Choir, The Guardian
- Schumann weekend, The Guardian
- Schumann focus, The Telegraph
- Forty Parts and Counting, MusicWeb International
- Jeremy Pound, delights of the Music Festival, BBC Music Magazine [1] [2]
- First weekend review — FOUR STARS in The Guardian
- You don’t have to be mad to be a composer, The Telegraph
- Symphony of life: making music out of the human genome, The Guardian
- Classical musical festivals: an unsung movement, insight from Meurig Bowen, The Independent
“Sacred and secular, national and international: this year’s Cheltenham Music Festival represents a stylish challenge to our disproportionately London-centric classical scene. With the coming weeks bringing major music festivals to Edinburgh, York, Gloucester and Dartington, the bar has been set high indeed.”
James Rhodes — iEncore!
We saw a classical exclusive on Tuesday as James Rhodes played his encore using the latest technology in place of traditional paper music.
Classical pianist James Rhodes, famed for his prodigious talent and rock star attitude, performed a sell-out recital of Bach, Beethoven and Chopin. Following rapturous applause he opted for a Chopin prelude as his final encore. James didn’t have his sheet music to hand, so instead turned to his new tablet computer, found an app with the Chopin score, and played from this. To turn the page, all he had to do was tap the screen.
Painted Quartets — bidding now closed…
Our Painted Quartets silent auction has now closed…a very big thanks to everyone who took part.
read about the Painted Quartets
Popular picks — to help you around…
The 2010 Music Festival, a wide ranging programme for families, children, and both serious and light music lovers….
our pick of nearly 80 events
Behind the scenes — perspectives on a music festival…
Music Festival Director Meurig Bowen reveals a little about what he and his colleagues are up to…
behind the scenes with Meurig
Music Festival Intern Hannah Ross writes about her experiences so far…
behind the scenes with Hannah
Plus an entertaining and unusual perspective from Hannah on all things musical…
a Shetlander at the Music Festival
Steven Isserlis — on BBC Radio 3…
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Robert Schumann and the Music of the Future, broadcast as a BBC Radio 3 Sunday feature on 6 June
…“exciting to be returning for the birthday party of one of my very favourite people — Robert Schumann.”
- Isserlis and Schumann 1 Friday 9 July
- Festival Academy 5: Isserlis and Schumann 2 Saturday 10 July
- Isserlis and Schumann 3: Brahms, Robert and Clara Sunday 11 July
- Steven Isserlis Monday 12 July
- Sound Mind 5: Venus, Mercury and St Cecilia Monday 12 July
Festival Academy — events, audio, who’s who…
Now in its sixth year, the Festival Academy nurtures some of the finest young talent from the UK’s conservatoires with a programme of coaching from professional musicians, community work and concert-giving.
Read about the Festival Academy’s 2010 performances, listen to audio clips, and find out who’s who.
more about the Festival Academy
Music 2010 — Meurig Bowen, Festival Director
An old medicine bottle containing mercury. A bejewelled dagger. The spike of a cello. An iconic Italian car.
Putting together a programme like this is — like the assembled items on the brochure cover — an intricately-combining balancing act. If you turn the page, the apparently random components of our cover’s ‘thematic sculpture’ are dismantled and explained.
You’ll see how and why this year’s HSBC Cheltenham Music Festival takes as its main starting point the anniversaries of three composers, and the uncanny coincidence that all three of them were, in their different ways, more than a little bit mentally unstable.
But all creative types are a bit on the edge, I hear you say, so why focus on these three in particular? Well, that can be part of the debate we’ll be having in our series Sound Mind, a sequence of events focusing on music, the brain and the mind, generously funded by the Wellcome Trust. Professor Ray Tallis has helped me put these events together: when you get the opportunity to work on a project with someone cited recently in Intelligent Life magazine as one of the world’s Top 20 Polymaths, believe me, you seize it fast!
You also wouldn’t pass up the opportunity to have Steven Isserlis, the world’s most distinguished Schumann expert and enthusiast, in residence during the bicentenary year of the great German composer’s birth.
See below for how Steven’s performances are at the heart of this festival’s 200th birthday celebration for Schumann. And follow the trail in the coming pages, to see how a fortnight of 80 hugely varied events adds up to a festival of cogent quality, surprise and delight.
Schumann in Cheltenham — Steven Isserlis writes…
It is a great pleasure to be returning to Cheltenham this summer; and particularly exciting to be returning for the birthday party of one of my very favourite people — Robert Schumann. The concerts I am devoting to him, with a range of musical friends, will include a mixture of the familiar and the unusual, as befits a composer half of whose output is curiously neglected. The repertoire will range from the magical Cello Concerto to some exotic songs and piano duets, and my friend and fellow-Schumanniac Simon Callow will join us for an evening of words and music focusing on the complicated relationships of Robert, his wife Clara and Brahms.
To most musicians, Schumann is a ‘beloved friend’; if he has not always held quite the same position in the hearts of audiences (or at least of concert- promoters!), that is an aberration that hopefully will soon be swept into the void. Nice to think that we’ll be doing our bit at Cheltenham!
Featured events
- Isserlis and Schumann 1 Friday 9 July
- Festival Academy 5: Isserlis and Schumann 2 Saturday 10 July
- Isserlis and Schumann 3: Brahms, Robert and Clara Sunday 11 July
- Steven Isserlis Monday 12 July
- Sound Mind 5: Venus, Mercury and St Cecilia Monday 12 July
External links
- Chipping Campden Music Festival
- With our reciprocal marketing this year we are working closely with the Chipping Campden 9th Annual Music Festival — Monday 10 May to Saturday 22 May 2010.
www.campdenmusicfestival.co.uk for more information - Longborough Festival Opera
- We are also combining marketing efforts with Longborough Festival Opera whose Longborough Opera House will be presenting throughout the summer.
www.lfo.org.uk for more information
