12 – 21 September 2024
St Asaph Cathedral

Theme: Transformations

Box Office

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01352 344101 (Mon - Sat, 10 - 6)

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01745 582929 (Wed - Fri, 10 - 4)

Child tickets are half price. Free events are not ticketed.

Launch video

Artistic Director’s Welcome

I am honoured and excited to welcome you to the North Wales International Music Festival 2024. My first as Artistic Director! Our 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 are marking the 90th anniversary of the Gresford Mining Disaster and have co-commissioned a new work from Welsh composer, Jon Guy and Welsh poet, Grahame Davies, for NEW Sinfonia and NEW Voices, which will explore themes of loss, identity and the environment. Also, we mark the 150th anniversary of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition which we will use 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 - perhaps 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 in what would have been his 90th birthday year and the world famous, 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, Elijah! Sure to be a highlight of the week.

Our Festival Fringe is a new departure for us. Come and join us at hostelries 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 fringe 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’. 

We are delighted that BBC Radio Cymru is our broadcast partner this year and will be broadcasting a number of events from the festival including our brand-new competition for young Welsh Musicians – the Pendine Young Musician of Wales. With the ongoing support of our headline sponsors, the Pendine Arts and Community Trust and the wonderful Mario and Gill Kreft, we are able to bring you this new competition which we hope will become a major event in the musical life of Wales.

Our community outreach work remains of vital importance to us. Professional musicians from Live Music Now Cymru and visual artists will deliver events within schools, care homes and St Kentigern Hospice, and we host a specific dementia friendly concert as well as our ever-popular tots concert.

Taking over from the wonderful Ann Atkinson was always going to be a tough challenge. She has guided the festival faultlessly for twenty years with an inspired vision, artistic integrity and always full of warmth and kindness. I hope I can live up to the challenge she has set me. And, I hope you join with me in thanking Ann for her outstanding service to the festival, our community and to all of the arts in North Wales.

Paul Mealor LVO CStJ