Welcome from Tim Lowe (Artistic Director)

For the 2024 festival I have gathered together another crop of the best string players in the country, all playing at the top of their game! The Leeds Piano Competition prize winner, American pianist, Andrew Brownell returns to us after a long absence.

The programme spotlights the centenary of the death of Gabriel Fauré, so we will play his beautiful Piano Quartet and his Second 'Cello Sonata, both amazingly youthful and life-affirming works for a composer in his late seventies and by then, sharing with Beethoven a composer’s worst nightmare, unable to hear, arguably, their greatest music. Who knows, as the outer world became silent to them so they found in their deepest, inner world, with no audible distractions, the source of their creativity.

The festival launches with a French themed 'cello recital (Debussy, Fauré, and Nadia Boulanger). In the Saturday lunchtime concert I will team up with flautist Sam Coles and Andrew Brownell in beautifully tuneful works by Weber and Hummel. The Weber trio sound to me more like an opera; full of arias and drama!

Saturday evening features piano quartets (Fauré  and Brahms). En route we play two Quintets (both with additional violas), Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet , like Brahms’s sextet, a youthful work and maybe his greatest chamber music. And where would we be without a Haydn String Quartet, this year his lyrical Op. 33 No. 3 “The Bird”. So come and hear duos, trios, quartets, quintets and finishing up on Sunday afternoon with the wonderfully life affirming Brahms String Sextet, Op.18, one of his greatest works and which was a turning point in his career.

Tim