Feast your ears as Summer Festival brings week of classical concerts to Buckingham

As classical music lovers in Buckingham prepare to feast their ears at the annual Buckingham Summer Festival in July, two performers are getting ready to fly in from Japan specially for this year’s festival.

This year’s Buckingham Summer Festival brings a week-long festival of classical music to Buckingham from July 8 to 15.

Founded in 1989 by the late Prof Alan Brook MBE and artistic director Robert Secret, the Buckingham Summer Festival offers a packed programme of three concerts a day by professional musicians, at affordable prices.

The Japan contingent includes professional concert pianist Yoshimi Sano, who is flying over for the Wednesday night concert, where she will perform piano duets with her daughter, Yuko Sano, also a concert pianist, who lives in the UK.

Italian pianist Marco Fatichenti, who is giving the morning recital on Tuesday, July 11, is also coming from Japan, where he lives with his Japanese wife. Marco will be playing in three concerts in the festival.

This year’s festival begins with a performance by the Buckingham Choral Society in Buckingham Parish Church at 7.30pm on Saturday, July 8.

Entitled Spring into Summertime, the concert is a modern interpretation of madrigals, including Rutter's Birthday Madrigals, Moeran's Songs of Springtime and Vaughan WIlliams' Three Elizabethan Partsongs.The Birthday Madrigals, written for the celebration of jazz pianist George Shearing's 75th birthday, bring classic madrigal texts to life for contemporary audiences with their rapture, sorrow, humour, and vitality.Moeran's Song of Springtime and Vaughan WIlliams’ Partsongs capture the essence of the season in their contemporary interpretation of Tudor words.

From Monday, July 10, to Friday, July 14, the festival offers a programme of three concerts day, at 11am, 1.15pm and 8pm.The Monday night concert is a semi-dramatised Lieder recital entitled Art Sung, about Clara Schumann. Acclaimed as a composer before her marriage to creative genius Robert Schumann, her own works have been neglected until recently.

Featuring an actress as well as a singer, with a narrative drawn from letters, diaries and images, this concert gives voice to a woman for whom music was an emotional haven.

If you’re in search of romance, Wednesday night’s concert features the Violin Sonata by Richard Strauss, a big piece with a great romantic sweep, and Brahms’ passionate Piano Quintet.

‘The next star of the guitar’ Emmanuel Sowicz – 2017 winner of Latin America’s most prestigious classical music competition, the Dr Luis Sigall International Music Competition and 2018 winner of the London International Guitar Competition – gives the 1.15pm concert on Thursday, July 13.

There’s a folk flavour to the 8pm concert on Friday, July 14, when four-piece folk band Moonrakers and string quartet OXUS perform folk songs and compositions from the Vaughan Williams repertoire.

The festival concludes with the Gala Concert with The Orchestra of Stowe Opera at Buckingham Parish Church at 8pm on Saturday, July 15, with Mendelssohn: Overture: The Hebrides Op. 26 ‘Fingal’s Cave’ as well as works by Haydn and Sibelius. It’s a rare chance to hear Sibelius's 3rd Symphony, with its beautiful and haunting second movement.

Most of the concerts take place in The Radcliffe Centre. For full details of all the events and to book tickets, visit the Buckingham Summer Festival website.