UK exclusives and Wales débuts at Gregynog Festival 2012

Gregynog, the oldest extant classical music festival in Wales and an excellent UK day out, is curated annually on a theme drawn from its unique heritage. The 2012 season takes Venezia as its inspiration to mark 100 years since Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, the last private owners of Gregynog Hall and the founders of the Festival, began purchasing their paintings of Venice by Monet, Sickert and Whistler.

These iconic images used to hang in the historic Music Room at Gregynog, the Festival’s principal performance space, and now form part of the core collection at National Museum Wales in Cardiff.

In a landmark year, Gregynog Festival has entered into a new three-year funding agreement with the Arts Council of Wales as well as securing enhanced support from other major sponsors. Artistic Director Dr Rhian Davies has seized the moment by inviting some of the world’s leading exponents of Venetian repertoire to interpret seven centuries of music associated with the city. “After three years’ planning,” Rhian said, “we have been fortunate to assemble an outstanding roster of international artists whom we believe would grace any festival worldwide. As ever, Gregynog Festival audiences will also enjoy the real privilege of hearing these star musicians perform in some of the most intimate and beautiful venues in rural Mid Wales.“

Gregynog Festival 2012: Venezia includes six Wales débuts and six UK season exclusive appearances. International ensembles include Jordi Savall, the doyen of the early music movement, with his group Hespèrion XXI who trace Ottoman and Sephardic influences on the medieval music of Venice (29 June, 7.30pm); La Venexiana, the specialist madrigal group renowned as the finest in the world, which performs the music of Claudio Monteverdi (17 June, 2.30pm); and Accademia Bizantina, the superb Ravenna-based and Grammy-nominated ensemble, which presents rare Venetian masterworks of the 17th and 18th centuries, directed from the keyboard by harpsichord virtuoso Ottavio Dantone (23 June, 7.30pm). Dantone gives a solo harpsichord recital the same afternoon, inspired by the legendary occasion when the young Handel gave a recital in Venice in maschera and was successfully unmasked because of the sheer quality of his playing by Domenico Scarlatti (23 June, 2.30pm).

Other major international soloists include Giuliano Carmignola, ‘a prince among Baroque violinists’ (Gramophone), who plays with the leading Venetian chamber ensemble, Sonatori de la Gioiosa Marca (24 June, 2.30pm); Xuefei Yang, the remarkable Chinese guitarist who takes us on a musical journey in the footsteps of Marco Polo from Venice to her native land (22 June, 7.30pm); Alessandro Taverna, the Venetian pianist who was bronze medallist at the 2009 Leeds International Pianoforte Competition and who presents a recital evoking his City of Water (16 June, 7.30pm); and Marta Rodrigo and Andreas Martin, the Catalan mezzo-soprano and German lutenist who perform works by the pioneering 17th-century Venetian woman composer, Barbara Strozzi (16 June, 2.30pm).