News & Events

Vive la Revolution! How to stage a festival in a time of turbulence

Stradivari Trust alumnus Jamie Walton has demonstrated how live music can still triumph during the North York Moors Chamber Music Festival. As Artistic Director of the widely acclaimed annual Festival, after the lockdown began in March Jamie was faced with an unenviable dilemma: how to proceed with plans for the two-week event in August. With the theme of ‘Revolution’ for the Festival, Jamie took inspiration and resolve – and some of the world’s finest musicians, including Italy’s Cremona Quartet and another Stradivari Trust beneficiary, Charlotte Scott, have just finished playing an astonishing programme focusing on the music of Beethoven – the “revolutionary” – and beyond to mark the 250th anniversary of the German composer’s birth in Bonn. Jamie points out that the Festival has been “the only and first work any of my colleagues have had since lockdown”.

Read more about Jamie’s extraordinary feat here.

photographer Matthew Johnson