The 2026 Peasmarsh Chamber Music Festival takes place between 25 and 28 June with our customary combination of world class musicians, stunning venues in Peasmarsh and in Rye and, we hope, beautiful midsummer weather!
The Festival includes nine performances across four days including an orchestral performance featuring the acclaimed Britten Sinfonia. We are also delighted to be working in six local primary schools, in a creative project led brilliantly by Sam Glazer, with partners the Astatine Trio, our guest ensemble. This project builds on 20 years of educational partnerships in this special corner of East Sussex, and offers composition and performance opportunities to nearly 200 children each year. This includes a group of 40 children from Rye Primary School who have been composing their song in workshops this week.
This year’s outstanding guest artists include pianists Valentin Magyar and Marianna Shirinyan, award winning US violist, Jennifer Stumm, and violist Edgar Francis, making his Peasmarsh debut, alongside returning friends, violinist Oliver Heath and cellist Kate Gould. Our concerts take place in the Norman church in Peasmarsh and in St Mary’s in Rye, both beautiful settings in which to enjoy stunning classical music. Our programme as always takes audiences on a journey through familiar works and those less well known, we hope offering something for everyone.
A particular highlight this year is our Friday evening performance at St Mary’s Church which takes place at 7.45pm on Friday 26 June. The concert features our artistic directors Anthony Marwood and Richard Lester as concerto soloists, with cellist Kate Gould, as well as the spectacular Britten Sinfonia.
The programme consists of Vivaldi’s concerto for two cellos, Schubert’s ever popular symphony No 5 and the violin concerto Distant Light by Peteris Vasks.
Anthony Marwood writes, “I’ve given more performances worldwide of Peteris Vasks’ Distant Light than any other concerto. With good reason – it’s a masterpiece, and the most ethereal and moving one, which takes players and listeners on a kind of powerful ‘journey of the soul’. It is truly a special piece. Vasks, a gentle man of intense convictions, achieves something great in this concerto, an eloquent singing line within a perfect sense of architecture, yet the way the music charts its course is also full of breathtaking colour. It features three solo violin cadenzas which grow in length and intensity and finally propel the music into a crisis, from which emerges a poetical and touching sense of resolution. The final gesture, recalling the opening, evaporates upwards, as if the soul reaches towards the distant light of eternity.”
I do hope you will be able to join us, and we look forward to welcoming you to our Festival whether it is your first visit or you are notching up your 28th Festival as we are! For further information, and to book tickets, please visit www.peasmarshfestival.co.uk
Image Credits: Graham Dunning , Walter van Dyck .