This is a little niche and perhaps bordering on the hyper-local for regular readers of the Thoroughly Good Blog, but it wouldn’t be Thoroughly Good if I didn’t highlight something happening on my own patch here in South East London, a tantalising 10-minute bike ride away from me here in Hither Green: the second Beckenham and Bromley Festival is scheduled for 17th – 19th September 2021.
The Bromley & Beckenham International Music Festival will this year stage four concerts at Bromley Parish Church, St Peter and St Paul’s Church.
Artistic Directors and Bromley residents Benjamin Grosvenor and Hyeyoon Park (this brings my tally of classical music talent on my doorstep to a mind-boggling ten people) founded the festival with festival director Raja Halder, putting on four concerts and raising £4200 for a local hospice too.
Watch Hyeyoon Park and Timothy Ridout perform Martinu’s Three Madrigals in the Beckenham and Bromley International Festival 2020
This year violist Timothy Ridout and cellist Bartholomew LaFollette return, plus there’s a festival debut from BBC Young Musician winner Laura van der Heijden. Concert programmes will include Rachmaninoff’s Trio Élégiaque No.2, Schubert’s Trio No.2 in E-flat and Britten’s Lachrymae, one of the 20th century’s greatest works for viola and piano, and the festival finale including Brahms’ titanic Piano Quintet.
The festival will also feature Joseph Tawadros in a programme of his own original music. Born in Cairo and raised in Sydney, Tawadros is a multi-award winning composer, improviser and champion of his extraordinary instrument, the Oud. His music draws on Arabic traditions combining it with western classical, jazz, world, folk, metal and bluegrass.
Free tickets for under-12s and a fiver for under-21s. Everyone else, £22. Not bad.
