The English Music Festival

The English Music Festival, now in its eighteenth year, celebrates the rich diversity of English music, bringing unjustly neglected and unheard works to life in the wonderfully atmospheric surroundings of Dorchester Abbey, alongside much-loved favourites.

The 2025 Festival, held over the second May Bank Holiday in Dorchester Abbey, will open with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Martin Yates in the World Premiere Performance of Stanley Bate’s Second Symphony, alongside Vaughan Williams’s Heroic Elegy and Triumphal Epilogue, Frederick Delius’s The Walk to Paradise Gardens, Williams Alwyn’s overture The Innumerable Dance and—commemorating the 50 years since his death—Bliss’s Cello Concerto with celebrated cellist Raphael Wallfisch.

The following morning, violinist Rupert Marshall-Luck and his pianist colleague Peter Cartwright—joining us from Johannesburg in South Africa—present premières of works by Norman O’Neill, Herbert Howells and Alan Rawsthorne: all these works have, until very recently, existed only in manuscript form and new editions have been made by specialist musicologists for this concert. The following song recital with Ben Alder and Dr Andrew Plant features songs of great beauty and charm by Howells, Maude Valérie White, Roger Quilter and Ivor Gurney.

For the Saturday main-evening concert, we are delighted to welcome the Royal Ballet Sinfonia to the EMF for the first time. The Royal Ballet Sinfonia is Britain’s busiest ballet orchestra, playing for Birmingham Royal Ballet’s wide-ranging programme in the UK and abroad as well as for the Royal Ballet; it also has a long tradition of playing for tours given by the world’s leading ballet companies, including Australian Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, Dutch National Ballet, National Ballet of Canada, Queensland Ballet, Paris Opéra Ballet, and New York City Ballet. Their programme for the EMF will include arrangements by Peter Warlock of early music alongside his Capriol Suite and music by Robin Milford and Cecil Armstrong Gibbs.

Our late-evening recitals are always extremely popular, the warm glow inside the Abbey contrasting pleasantly with the gathering darkness outside and the intimate programmes providing the perfect end to an convivial day of concerts. On Saturday evening, the young and brilliant guitarist Jack Hancher will present the first of these recitals in the 2025 Festival, his programme ranging from John Dowland to Cyril Scott.

The traditional convivial EMF Lunch—now held in the Gilbert Scott-designed Village Hall—on Sunday will be followed by a wind band concert featuring music by Holst, Vaughan Williams, Ireland and Gordon Jacob, alongside the UK première of Martin Ellerby’s Wessex Dances; while EMF regulars, the Godwine Choir with conductor Hilary Davan Wetton, return for an evening choral concert of music by Delius, Dyson, Holst, Howells and John Gardner.

The late evening concert on Sunday is another first for the EMF, as we welcome singer-songwriter, early music specialist and lecturer Dr Steph Connor with an event that will combine folk, early music and jazz, showcasing the broad range of genres with which the EMF is associated.

More treats abound the following day, commencing with a recital from acclaimed pianist Hiroaki Takenouchi, followed by the Berkeley Ensemble—celebrating the release of their recording for EM Records—in a recital of music by Howells, Dorothy Howell and John Blackwood McEwen, alongside Elgar’s much-loved Piano Quintet. The final concert also ties in with an EM Records disc launch as we welcome back Excalibur Voices conducted by Duncan Aspden, who gave such an astoundingly superb programme last year that they are returning in 2025 by popular demand: music by Finzi, Rawsthorne and Armstrong Gibbs, among others, will conclude the Festival on an uplifting and energising note.