Bath Mozartfest

About

Bath Mozartfest is an annual 9 day 15 concert festival taking place this year from Friday 7 – Saturday 15 November.

Now in its 35th year, with performances by the very best national and international classical musicians, it attracts music lovers from all around the UK and overseas. The festival is renowned for quality and excellence, endorsed by regular 5 -star media reviews.

Concerts take place this year in the beautiful city of Bath, in historic venues of Bath Abbey, Guildhall, St Mary's Bathwick and the Forum.

As always, the music of Mozart lies at its heart and we open with the Schumann Quartet, making their Bath debut, playing Mozart’s deeply moving String Quartet No 15.

There is a wealth of new talent this year as we also have the Consone Quartet, with Kristian Bezuidenhout, and the Carducci String Quartet and Castalian String Quartet for their inaugural Mozartfest performances.

We are delighted to see old friends making return visits, too: Henning Kraggerud (violin), Adrian Brendel (cello) and Imogen Cooper (piano) are all well-known and respected independently, but come together here to play Schubert’s Piano Trios. The Leonore Piano Trio will also make a welcome re-appearance, in a concert including Dvořák’s tempestuous third Piano Trio.

Cédric Tiberghien, also familiar to regular audience members, will be playing Beethoven’s great Diabelli Variations.  And Beethoven, as well as Mozart of course, will feature in Jennifer Pike’s concert in the form of his Violin Sonata No 5, Spring.

The Nash Ensemble's programme this year includes Ralph Vaughan Williams beloved work The Lark Ascending, alongside two Mozart pieces and Mendelssohn’s sublime Octet.

The outstanding German-Romanian baritone Konstantin Krimmel will sing Schubert’s Winterreise, accompanied by Simon Crawford-Phillips, and the latter will appear again with Philip Moore, the acclaimed piano duo including Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring in their programme.

Bath Mozartfest has long championed youthful talent setting out on international careers, and we are delighted to include a Saturday morning concert featuring BBC Radio 3 New Generation artists and alumni.

Tenebrae bring to Bath a divine programme of English music from the sixteenth century, and I’m delighted that Sir Mark Elder will be making another visit to Bath, now as the Hallé orchestra’s Conductor Emeritus. The Hallé’s performance will see Imogen Cooper making her second appearance of the week, here playing Mozart’s final, beautifully poetic, Piano Concerto No 27.

The festival will draw to a close with La Nuova Musica and Mozart’s Mass in C minor, known as the ‘Great’ for good reason.