Gower Festival

Please note that the Royal Quartet concert on Saturday 17 July has been moved to the church at Llangennith (St Cenydd) which is 4 miles west of Llanrhidian, starting at the later time of 7.45 pm. A shuttle bus will run from the top of the hill down into the village and back again after the concert.

For the 35^th successive year the lovely old churches of the Gower peninsula will be opening their doors in the last fortnight of July to outstanding musicians from all over the world who will be travelling to Wales to bring chamber music performances of the highest quality to this beautiful area.

String quartets are always a very popular feature of the Festival, which opens this year with a concert by the Royal Quartet, the ensemble of fine young players from Poland, who will play music by Mozart, Shostakovich and Grieg. On the penultimate evening the Quartetto di Cremona, another group of young players who have been making an enviable reputation for themselves, perform quartets by Haydn, Beethoven and Borodin. And towards the end of the first week of the Festival two more young quartets – the Navarra Quartet and the Sacconi Quartet – will join forces in a programme that comprises sextets by Strauss and Brahms followed by the sublime Octet in E flat by Mendelssohn.

Three other chamber groups will perform, including the acclaimed Sitkovetsky Piano Trio, led by the young Russian virtuoso Alexander Sitkovetsky (playing music by Haydn, Brahms and Mendelssohn), and the Sally Pryce Ensemble, who will play the Introduction and Allegro by Ravel. The same concert will include Gig by the young Welsh composer Huw Watkins and the Clarinet Quintet by Mozart in which the soloist will be Sarah Williamson, one of our finest young clarinettists. The Gonzaga Band, one of the most outstanding early music groups of the present day, will present a chamber vespers that their director Jamie Savan has devised to commemorate the 400^th anniversary of the publication of Monteverdi’s Vespers (1610).

We will hear two piano recitals during the Festival, one by the Russian-Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg who will perform works by Beethoven, Prokofiev, Rachmaninov and, in honour of the bicentenary of Chopin’s birth, the Nocturne Op 28 No 1 and Ballade No 4. Lithuanian pianist Evelina Puzaite, who is not only a very gifted pianist but also an author who published her first collection of short stories and poems in 2008, will give the second piano recital. She will play works by Mozart, Liszt, Prokofiev, Kodaly and the Latvian composer Peteris Vasks.

Welsh violinist Sara Trickey, winner of the Grace Williams Memorial Prize, will be accompanied by Tom Poster in a recital that includes sonatas by Beethoven and Elgar, and, to mark the bicentenary of the composer’s birth, Sonata No 1 in A minor by Schumann. The much-admired Swansea Bach Choir will perform his Spanisches Liederspiel in their concert, which will also include two choral works by Brahms, Weltliche Gesänge and the ever-popular first set of Liebeslieder Walzer.

This year’s song recital is given by the fine young soprano Laura Mitchell who won the Song Prize in the 2007 Kathleen Ferrier Competition and, the following year, First Prize in the John Kerr Award for English Song. Laura has chosen to feature a group of English songs in her programme for Gower, where her accompanist will be Charlotte Forrest.

Like so many of the young musicians familiar to recital audiences today, Mexican guitarist Morgan Szymanski came to prominence a few years ago when he was selected for representation by Young Concert Artists Trust. We are delighted that he will be with us this year and look forward to a programme that will feature several attractive works by Latin American composers – a musical idiom that holds a special place in his affections.

Our Festival Lecture is given this year by Tim Hughes, author of Wales’s Best One Hundred Churches and he will be speaking on the subject of Churches in the landscape and culture of Wales. The venue for this occasion is what many consider to be the most beautiful of the churches in Gower, St. Cadoc at Cheriton.

And to close this year’s Festival we welcome the American organist Carlo Curley, one of the most successful and well-known international organists of the present day, who will present his concert in his own inimitable way. An idea of the informality of the occasion can be gleaned from the comment that he requests to be printed in his concert programme which says – “Carlo Curley’s audiences have always brought him the greatest pleasure and so he looks forward to meeting and greeting you all before and after the performance and also during the interval”.

We look forward once more to seeing our regular visitors to the Gower Festival and will be delighted to meet those who will be with us for the first time. All can be sure of a warm welcome.