Bromsgrove Festival is young at heart
Apr 23 2010 By Christopher Morley
Bromsgrove Festival is 50 years old but its spirit remains as youthful and fresh as ever. Christopher Morley reports.
Bromsgrove Festival celebrates its half century this year and the 50-year-old event remains as vital as ever.
Unlike some enterprises which plod on and become ever so slightly dull, Bromsgrove has had the knack of continually re-inventing itself, right from its launch under the directorship of Harold Taylor in 1960.
This perennial youthfulness of attitude persists under Mary White, herself celebrating 30 years as festival chairman, who makes it her business to seek out fresh young talent and bring it to this north Worcestershire market town every spring.
Springtime, with blossom everywhere, is one aspect of the festival’s charm. Another is the the range of locations it employs, having moved on from the time, years ago, when almost all the events were held in worthy but somewhat musty school and college halls.
Nowadays the welcoming and still bright-as-a-new-pin Artrix is a popular venue, with comfortable seating, excellent sight-lines, and its own capacious, well-lit and free car park, easy to find just off the A38.
Continuing south, you soon come to the fascinating Avoncroft Museum of Buildings where another well-loved venue can be found: the New Guesten Hall, with its medieval carved roof bringing a warm sense of cosiness to this perfect ambience for smaller-scale concerts.
Though the lively Festival Fringe kicked off last weekend (with a piano recital given by Harold Taylor himself), and will continue with a variety of rock and folk-music events in various local watering-holes, the main part of the Bromsgrove Festival gets under way at the Artrix tomorrow evening (Friday), with an orchestral concert from the European Union Chamber Orchestra.
But this is no ordinary concert. It celebrates yet another Bromsgrove anniversary, the 30 years of the festival’s important International Young Musicians’ Platform, a competition which has launched many young performers on glittering careers. These include cellist Guy Johnston (second-prize winner in 1999, BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2000), violinist and quartet-leader Corina Belcea, Australian saxophonist Amy Dickson, and violinist Alexander Sitkovetsky.
“The quality of the Young Musicians’ Platform often seems to be Bromsgrove’s best kept secret,” says Mary White, “and for this concert we have invited back last year’s finalists, each playing their own concerto”.
Ilya Movchan performs Mendelssohn’s D minor Violin Concerto (written when the composer was 13), Jonathan Wilson is soloist in Mozart’s A major Piano Concerto K414, and Haydn’s C major Cello Concerto is given by Mikhail Nemtsov.
This year’s competition takes place at the New Guesten Hall over a very long weekend at the end of the month, starting on April 29 and continuing every day (admission free), until the finals concert on May 2. The number of days devoted to the competition is eloquent evidence of the number of hopeful 17-25 year-olds who have been attracted to this part of the world.
