Festival Themes
The Stratford International Festival of Words and Music is a celebration of ideas as well as language – formed of the conviction that joined-up thinking can change beliefs, attitudes and lives. Each year, we shall be focussing on one or more keynote themes to create narratives and to inspire dialogue. Although we are a local festival, we aim to promote global thinking across every discipline and culture, for people interested in more than distraction, and who want to think as well as feel.
BEETHOVEN AND THE GOTHIC
Beethoven and the Gothic is a unique celebration of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. At the core of the Festival’s thinking is the essential, and little understood connection between the now-divided disciplines of arts and science – of which Frankenstein is the most celebrated example. Beethoven and the Gothic explores the relationship between the composer and the wider Gothic movement, celebrating Mary Shelley’s achievement while highlighting Beethoven’s colossal effect as a personality and an artist on Europe’s cultural, philosophical, political and religious landscape. Through words and music, Beethoven and the Gothic will illustrate the remarkable extent to which Beethoven’s music and Shelley’s novel spoke for (and to) a European society changed forever by enlightenment, revolution and war. The Festival’s Artistic Director, Matthew Boyden, has written a book to accompany the project, to be published in September, 2018. Friends of the Festival will receive a pre-publication copy of the book.
THE PORTAMENTO PROJECT
The 2018 Festival has been designed around the exceptional talent of Tamsin Waley-Cohen and the Albion String Quartet. Central to Tamsin and the Albion’s programme, is The Portamento Project, created to explore the rise and fall of portamento, and how its fortunes speak to much wider social considerations, most obviously cultural voice, taste and fashion, and identity. The Project is not concerned with period performance, but rather the bizarre history of a once ubiquitous feature of string playing that completely vanished before the end of the Second World War. The Albion’s concerts will contribute to a dialogue between past and present, pursuing questions reaching far beyond the narrow confines of music, with illustrated talks by Matthew Boyden (on portamento and identity), Rabbi Lior Kaminetsky (on the Cantor tradition and the Diaspora), and David Crystal (on the parallels between portamento and the Original Pronunciation of Shakespeare).
THE SINCEREST FORM OF FLATTERY
As a prelude to the 2019 Stratford Festival (themed around “The Art and Science of Copying”), the 2018 programme features a two-concert/four-talk series entitled The Sincerest Form of Flattery. The first concert features Tamsin Waley-Cohen performing Bach and Bartok, the second a concert of English music for string orchestra in which each of Tippet’s Fanatasie Concertante on a theme of Corelli, Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, and Vaughan-Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis will be performed alongside the works by which they were inspired. Orchestra of the Swan will also be giving the world premiere of an arrangement by Matthew Boyden of Tallis’ Spem in Alium for string orchestra, alongside a performance of the original motet by the Festival choir, Verba et Musica.