The North Wales International Music Festival is being held at St Asaph Cathedral from Thursday 12 September – Saturday 21 September under the baton of new Artistic Director, composer Paul Mealor.
Paul Mealor, who is from North Wales, has written music for film and television including the score to the BAFTA-Award winning ‘Wonders of the Celtic Deep’, three operas, four symphonies, concerti, chamber music, much choral music and songs, including the 2011 Christmas No 1, ‘Wherever You Are’ for Gareth Malone and the Military Wives Choir.
He has also composed music for many royal occasions, including the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton, now the Prince and Princess of Wales, and the Kyrie sung by Sir Bryn Terfel at the King’s Coronation. He was recently appointed a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order (LVO) for his services to royal music. Taking the helm at the festival has brought his career full circle because he was mentored as a young musical protégé by the festival’s founder, the late Professor William Mathias, a fellow Welsh royal composer who would have been 90 this year.
The festival theme for 2024 is ‘transformations’ and everything that it encompasses from the physical and natural world to the poetic, the spiritual and the metaphysical and everything in between. We aim to explore how the arts can transform us and our communities and, through various art forms, styles and genres how we are, in turn, transformed by them.
We commemorate the 90th anniversary of the Gresford Mining Disaster and have co-commissioned a new community opera Gresford: Up From Underground from Welsh composer, Jon Guy and Welsh poet, Grahame Davies, for NEW Sinfonia and NEW Voices, which explores themes of loss, identity and the environment. Also, we mark the 150th anniversary of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition which we are using as a starting point to explore, in art workshops and a new composition project with pianist Iwan Llewelyn-Jones, themes of the war in Ukraine and music’s role within community and national conflict.
We welcome the world’s No 1 brass band, Foden’s Band to the festival for the first time in a concert that is sure to raise the roof, and we also host the amazing Ar Log, one of Wales’s greatest folk bands, in an evening of their popular classics and some new songs written especially for them. Baritone, Jeremy Huw Williams explores the music of our founder William Mathias, Fauré and Welsh folksongs, and the world famous The King’s Singers make a welcome return with their dazzling vocal artistry.
The BBC National Orchestra of Wales bring us perhaps one of the most famous pieces of British music, Elgar’s Enigma Variations with its famous hymn, Nimrod at its centre, and Rhyl-born young pianist, Ellis Thomas makes his BBC NOW debut in Mathias’s youthful Piano Concerto No1, written when Mathias was the same age Ellis is today. The combined choirs of Trystan Lewis’s North Wales Choral Union make their festival debut too with a performance of one of the giants of the choral repertoire, Mendelssohn’s Elijah. Sure to be a highlight of the week.
New for this year is the launch of the Festival Fringe alongside the main concert programme. Come and join us in Jacob’s Ladder coffee shop and The New Inn in St Asaph and enjoy music in a more relaxed atmosphere in a late-night setting over a glass of your favourite drink. We have an RnB/ Hip-hop concert with Aisha Kigs, Welsh folk music with Angharad Jenkins & Patrick Rimes, a poetry and literary evening with one of Wales’s leading writers, Grahame Davies and the festival ends with a celebration of comedy in our first ever North Wales Comedy Night.
Another highlight this year will be the inaugural Pendine Young Musician of Wales competition in partnership with headline sponsors the Pendine Arts and Community Trust. The competition is open to all musicians who were born or who are living in Wales or who are Welsh nationals studying abroad. All musicians must be under the age of 21 on 1 January 2024 to be eligible to compete but there is no minimum age for entry. The winner will receive a cash prize of £2,000 and the Pendine Trophy, as well as being invited back to perform at next year’s festival. Entries for the competition are now being accepted via the festival’s website - nwimf.com - and the closing date for applications is 31 August.
The festival has been supported by main grant funders the Arts Council of Wales, Colwinston Charitable Trust, Arts & Business Cymru and Tŷ Cerdd. This year’s festival is part funded by the UK government through the UK Shared Prosperity Fund for Denbighshire.
Our community outreach work remains of vital importance to us. Visual artists and professional musicians from Live Music Now Cymru will deliver events within additional learning needs schools, day care centres, care homes and St Kentigern Hospice, and we host our free Dementia Friendly concert as well as our ever-popular free Tots and Children’s concert.
Tickets and further details about the festival programme and the Pendine Young Musician of Wales competition are available on the festival’s website - nwimf.com.
Tickets are also available from Cathedral Frames, St Asaph - 01745 582929 (Weds - Fri, 10 - 4) and Theatr Clwyd by phone - 01352 344101 (Mon - Sat, 10 - 6).