Bold programming impresses at Presteigne Festival

The Presteigne Festival went Polish this year with an enterprising perspective of contemporary and post-war works including the world première of Paveł Łukaszewski’s newly commissioned Requiem. 

Benjamin Britten was very precise about what constituted the official canon of his works, but, in addition to his stipulated 95 opus numbers, he composed a huge amount of occasional music.

The classification of composers into those who write tonal music and those who inhabit the harder-edged shores of serialism and atonality raised its head once again at the first of the three concerts given by the Festival Chamber Orchestra at this year’s Presteigne Festival.

The culmination of Thomas Ades' Beethoven cycle with the Britten Sinfonia channels Beethoven's atavistic energies. 

Love and Passion provide a vibrant theme for an enterprising choral concert given by the Choir of Royal Holloway. 

Embarrassing puns aside, the music of Arvo Pärt is hardly the staple fare of late-night revellers on Bristol’s Park Street, especially on a Friday. Tucked just around the corner, though, St George’s was celebrating the end of the long summer drought of live classical music courtesy of the Choir of Royal Holloway – fresh from their tour of the Balkan states – and the Bristol Ensemble.