Music at Paxton launches 2022 Programme
Florence Lockheart
Friday, April 22, 2022
This year's festival features partnerships designed to support emerging artists including young musicians and female composers
Scotland’s Music at Paxton festival returns this July for nine days of international chamber music at Paxton House in the Scottish Borders. This year’s festival will feature Scottish premières, as well as exciting partnerships designed to support emerging artists including young musicians and female composers
The festival will build on its association with Live Music Now Scotland to offer three concerts with the organisation’s artists as well as Music at Paxton…Plus - free one hour taster concerts in May and June. Designed to bring music to the local community as well as to support and promote early career artists, these tasters will feature harpist Sophie Rocks and the Phoenix Duo.
Young talent is also represented in this year’s programme by baritone Jerome Knox, winner of the London Handel Festival Competition in 2020. Knox will sing 10% of baritone Roderick Williams’ programme for the festival as part of the Momentum scheme. Created by conductor and sporano Barbara Hannigan in 2020, the scheme is a response to the hardships faced by young talent during the pandemic, as an investment into the younger generation.
Williams worked with Angus Smith, the festival’s artistic director, to invite Knox. Smith said: ‘More than ever, we are committed to giving a platform to brilliant young musicians in the early stages of their professional careers, and to providing lots of family friendly events, so that all generations have a chance to enjoy a great range of fabulous music together under one roof.’
As artistic director, Smith is keen to address gender imbalance in the composers featured at the festival and so Music at Paxton has teamed up with Thaxted Festival to jointly commission a set of songs by emerging composer Sarah Cattley who has set poems by three 20th century female poets - Fredegond Shove, Charlotte Mew and Frances Cornford.
Cattley’s works will be performed by Roderick Williams, accompanied by pianist Susie Allan, at the festival’s opening concert on 22 July which celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams and will include a Q&A after the performance.
The 2022 festival marks the final year of the Maxwell Quartet’s (pictured) residency. The ensemble pair Brahms and Haydn, with Roxanna Panufnik’s The Audience with narration by BBC Radio Scotland broadcaster, Jamie MacDougall.
Other highlights will include mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly performing the Scottish première of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Songs of Sleep and Regret and pianist Pavel Kolesnikov presenting a centenary celebration of Marcel Proust as well as the Echéa Quartet, accordionist Ryan Corbett and BBC Next Generation Artists Mithras Piano Trio. Pianist Angela Hewitt will close the festival with a programme of Mozart, Bach and Chopin.
You can find out more about Music at Paxton’s 2022 programme here.