Winter Festival 2023

11 – 19 – February 2023

Welcome to our 2023 festival!

After a two year hiatus, it was particularly special to be back at Treowen and sharing music with you all once again. It was wonderful that Robin Michael, Matthew Truscott, Tom Dunn and Florence Cook were again with us, musicians whose first visits date back to our pre-2007 days in St Briavels Castle, and some of whom were here at the very first festival in 2000. But it was equally noteworthy to welcome new faces – Abby Bowen, Enyuan Khong, Toby White and JongSun Woo – as well as many artists who have joined the Wye Valley family along our journey.

Someone else joining us for the first time was Katy Hamilton, known to many of us from her writing and appearances on BBC Radio 3, who presented our Discovery Day on the final Saturday. 

Elsewhere in the programme, Franck’s monumental String Quartet and Debussy’s ground-breaking Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, were presented alongside works less often-heard by Chaminade,  Saint-Saëns and Fauré. A Russian pairing of Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich was heard on Thursday evening, and the festival ended with music by perhaps the three foremost composers in the genre: Haydn, Beethoven and Bartók.