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Songs of the Sea, the opening concert of the Leeds Lieder Festival, leaves the audience in a happy and buoyant mood.

Young poets and composers meet to create new songs on Leeds Lieder's Day of Song at Leeds College of Music. 

Joseph Middleton and Carolyn Sampson were perfectly matched in Fleurs, the final concert of Leeds Lieder's Day of Song at The Venue in Leeds.

“Made in Yorkshire” was a misleading title for this afternoon concert because the connections with the county were tenuous: tenor Joshua Ellicott made a point of reminding us before he started that he was born on the other side of the Pennines, and the only apparent link for soprano Bibi Heal, clarinettist Colin Honour and the man at the piano Anthony Kraus (a popular and respected chorusmaster an

The first part of the Celebrity Recital which brought the Leeds Lieder Festival to a close was entitled “Schubert Looking North”, which included a section on German versions of British poets.

It was hard to choose from the fascinating menu for The Composer’s Echo (the title for this Leeds Lieder Festival), which is described as “a feast of song from the great Western European tradition which fuses poetry and music” by the festival’s director, Jane Anthony.

Festival Director Jane Anthony made a brief appearance before this concert, reminding the audience that it was dedicated to the memory of Lord Harewood, who died earlier this year. He had been a staunch supporter of Leeds Lieder+, with a great gift for spotting and developing young singers.

It was a rare opportunity: a chance to experience Olivier Messiaen’s Harawi , a song-cycle rarely-performed on account of its considerable demands on singer and pianist: most would consider very carefully before taking it on. Inspired by Wagner’s version of the Tristan and Isolde legend and its Love-Death (Liebestod) ending, it is the first of a trilogy.

This coming together of poets and musicians after months of preparation, many of them newly-fledged, all of them endowed with exceptional talent, was a central event of this festival, divided into nine sections. It was an opportunity to hear the future, which is sunny.

Florian Boesch reminded me of the terror I felt as a nine year-old boy treble: I had to walk home in the dark after rehearsing Schubert's version of The Erlking, with phantoms following.

Leeds Lieder+, the northern biennial festival of art song, began on Friday night with Bright is the Ring of Words. Advertised as a celebration of British verse, the evening featured settings of the words of Lord Byron, Robert Louis Stevenson and Shakespeare by a diverse range of composers including Mendelssohn, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Richard Strauss, Roger Quilter and John Dankworth.