Cheltenham Music Festival
- a view from the street
3 ~ 11 July 2026
Various Venues, Cheltenham UK
Various Venues, Cheltenham UK
Cheltenham Improvisers Orchestra
For a festival that was established to generate new music in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Cheltenham Music Festival has evolved into one of the most established classical festivals in Europe today. New music is still represented but eighty-one years on and its focus has inevitably shifted. With this year's festival reaching out through a broader fringe programme, I found myself wondering whether that spirit of discovery might be found in more unlikely places.
There’s an important opportunity here for music to filter out of the music halls into the surrounding streets and cafés. There might also be a chance to recognise the town’s ecosystem of grassroots music communities too. I became a busker in my early teens and it’s the reason why I play music now. I also grew up around punk music and that DIY sentiment has always stuck with me. On the other hand I’m really interested in the role of classical music in contemporary practices, and particularly seeing it pitched in more unusual spaces, so I was looking forward to this.
Throughout the year I work with a community group called Cheltenham Improvisers Orchestra. We’re an orchestra by name but by nature it’s pretty far removed from your average Royal Philharmonic. By and large we’re made up of amateur players which is something I’m incredibly proud of, and there’s no hierarchy to this. Some travel from far out of town, often from less privileged neighbourhoods. We performed on the first Saturday of the festival at The Wilson Art Gallery & Museum to a packed room looking out onto the street as buses and bicycles glided past. We had two double basses standing in the window and the orchestra was filled with Indian tongue drums, bowed banjos, clarinets, zithers, and a whole range of electronic instruments.
I also got to see the Tewkesbury Pub Singers in a pub garden, and a saxophone quartet in a former skittle alley. Walking into a café and hearing a string quartet or passing a garden while a silver band plays is what the fringe programme is all about. To stumble across a piece of classical music in the wild lends a degree of surprise that you might not find in the concert hall.
A more established part of the festival is the Composers Academy which offers a week-long residency for early career composers. This year's showcase took place within an industrial warehouse at Deya Brewery and featured five composers' works performed by The Carice Singers. It presented an opportunity to meet people engaging with new music and also to hear new works in progress for the first time. It felt a little bit like I had just wandered into a very well rehearsed college seminar, but considering the festival’s initial spirit of regeneration, the Composers Academy is a much needed reminder of that spirit and of how important contemporary performance practices are in bringing new music to life.
A highlight of the main programme was the Idrîsî Ensemble led by Corsican musician Thomas Fournil. With the exception of the closing piece, a movement from the famous fourteenth century mass by Guillaume de Machaut, I would be surprised if many people in the room were familiar with any of the pieces played, I certainly wasn’t. The programme included UNESCO-protected and endangered improvised singing traditions from Occitania and beyond. This was a brilliant example of how historic music has the ability to address contemporary issues in a way that new music doesn’t always know how to - it reveals something both rare and unexpected. Idrîsî Ensemble tells a powerful story about cultural migration, an expression that matters more today than ever.
Chris Cundy