Cambridge Summer Music Festival 2024 to feature a month of live concerts

A whole month of live music is coming to the city when The Cambridge Summer Music festival begins next week.

It’s the oldest music festival in Cambridge, is supported once again by the Cambridge Independent, and will offer the chance to see some of today’s most celebrated classical musicians - as well as those tipped to be future stars - perform in beautiful locations around the city.

There are 30 events taking place throughout July, from the much-loved Sounds Green free outdoor concerts in the Botanic Garden, to opera, chamber music, orchestral and choral concerts, jazz, song recitals and more.

Ben Johnson, the acclaimed international tenor, is in his second year as festival director.

“I want July to be the month of Cambridge Summer Music and this will be a whole month of celebration,” says Ben.

“Many of the groups performing in the festival are celebrating special anniversaries, including the Crouch End Festival Chorus celebrating their 40-year anniversary with a Duke Ellington sacred concert in King’s College Chapel. It’s Ellington infused with religious music, which was lovely. And it’s quite unique and doesn’t get performed very often. It’s nice to have something to showcase something that’s not your run-of-the-mill concert repertoire.

“The Gesualdo Six are celebrating their tenth anniversary and will be performing music by Josquin. They are very popular and regulars at the festival so we are pleased to have them back.

“The St John Passion is 300 years old in 2024. We have a performance of that in Trinity College, conducted by Tim Brown, with English voices and The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment Enlightenment - that’s a rather special one.”

Ben will be conducting the final event in the series, at which the Academy of St Martin in the Fields joins forces with the Academy of English Voices and star soloist Martin James Bartlett for a Celebration of Mozart. Beginning with the eight-year-old Mozart’s E-Flat Symphony, and concluding with his final masterpiece, Requiem, it also features the K. 482 Piano Concerto.

Ben says: “Obviously Mozart’s Requiem is ever popular, but we’re also doing his very first symphony, which he wrote when he was about eight years old. So we’ve got his first symphony and the Requiem he was still writing when he died - they are these pieces from both ends of his life.

“The reason I put the piano concerto in between the pieces is that there is a compositional device in the first symphony that the grown-up Mozart uses again in the opening of the piano concerto in the same key. So it’s interesting to see him take an idea that he’s had since he was a child and use it again for even more spectacular effects in the piano concerto.

“The piano concerto has the most beautiful melodies. It is Mozart at his best and is the first piano concerto where he writes with clarinets instead of oboe. It is no small thing to say that gives it a really beautiful colour, the melodies and the harmony are absolutely joyous. The first and the last movements are pure, unadulterated joy. The theme of the last movement is very famous. It’s used in the film Amadeus. And the slow movement is one of his most intense, beautiful, slow movements which at the first performance - we know in a letter from Mozart’s father - was instantly encored straightaway. So as soon as they finished it, the audience had to hear it again. They loved it so much.

“It’s a programme I’ve wanted to do for a long time to pair the first symphony with the Requiem. The thrill is going, ‘Look I love this stuff. And I want to share it with you. I love this musician’.

“Seeing people’s response at the concerts is amazing - that gives you such a buzz. It’s very different from the response one gets from performing, which is lovely. But this is unique. It’s a different thing to bring people together and see a whole room or chapel or concert hall full of people love something that you’ve wanted to share with them. That is such a thrill, and it’s one of the addictive parts about this job.”

One of the other highlights for Ben will be Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin, sung by British baritone Huw Montague Rendall, accompanied by pianist Graham Johnson.

Ben says: “The young baritone Huw is taking over the world and he’s performing with with Graham Johnson, who is probably the most experienced and respected piano accompanist in the world. So we’ve got these two great musicians coming together. Huw has got a voice of a generation. Both his parents are opera singers but his voice is extremely beautiful. I think his voice will go down in history - it’s one in a million.

“Meanwhile Graham is the master of Schubert - what he doesn’t know about Schubert, no one does. He has of course recorded the complete works of Schubert on Hyperion and written an encyclopaedia about Schubert, as well as performed him all of his life.

Before the performance, ticket holders are invited to join Graham Johnson discussing the work, and his career, in a pre-concert talk with Ben.

He adds: “This is only my second year in charge. We had a great year last year. But so much of that has been because of the support we get and that’s given me the confidence to try and spread our wings and fill up the month of July with cultural events and to work with young people and young musicians. We couldn’t do it without the support we get.”

Visit https://cambridgesummermusic.com/csmfestival2024/ for more information and tickets.