Tetbury Music Festival
26 September - 4 October 2026

Step into a spellbinding fusion of music and theatre as The Soldier’s Tale brings the Devil, a princess, and a wayward soldier vividly to life in Igor Stravinsky’s iconic work. 

This production is led by internationally acclaimed violinist Miranda Fulleylove, with a seven-piece ensemble of Britain’s finest musicians, performing with incisive energy and precision in support of a cast of singer/actors. 

Directed by immersive theatre specialist Elgiva Field and conducted by Peter Ash, Artistic Director of the Odyssey Festival Orchestra, the performance weaves together fine musicianship with ebullient storytelling.

Lasting just one hour, the performance will be presented twice on the same evening, at 6pm and again at 8pm, providing two opportunities to experience this inventive and exhilarating cautionary tale...

This conversation will explore the scholarship and artistic choices behind Michele Pasotti’s production of Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda by Claudio Monteverdi. Drawing on Monteverdi’s own account of the 

work’s first performance in 1624 at the Palazzo Mocenigo in Venice, Pasotti will show how this striking piece originally unfolded before an audience of Venetian nobles, reportedly moved to the brink of tears.

Central to this reconstruction is Monteverdi’s own guidance in the preface to his Eighth Book of Madrigals, where he outlines a carefully structured sequence designed to heighten the work’s expressive and theatrical impact through contrast. Pasotti examines how these insights inform a historically grounded performance approach, which best reveals the interplay between music, text, and staging

One of the world’s greatest violin virtuosos, Viktoria Mullova continues her collaboration with Alasdair Beatson, together playing Beethoven and Schubert on gut strings and fortepiano. During their three-year collaboration they have released a first duo disc of Schubert, followed by a Beethoven disc of Sonatas 6, 1 and 8 in 2024, and more recently their third duo album of Beethoven Sonatas 2 and 10. The combination of fortepiano and gut string violin are what Beethoven’s music craves, giving a rich texture and distinct colours between the registers.

This evening they perform Beethoven's 2nd, 3rd and 9th Sonatas.  The fortepiano has been hired from Wigmore Hall, and Viktoria  plays either her ‘Jules Falk’ 1723 Stradivarius or her Guadagnini violin.

The renowned Italian ensemble La Fonte Musica returns to Tetbury under the baton of Michele Pasotti  with a performance of 'La Sera del Combattimento' which recreates the first performance of Monteverdi’s 'Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda', following the composer’s own vivid account of that historic evening. 

Although a man of few words, Monteverdi left invaluable guidance on how the work should be presented for maximum effect, which is being followed tonight. He noted that the 'Combattimento' should be preceded by madrigals sung 'without any gesture,' so that the sudden entrance of the protagoniste would heighten the sense of dramatic surprise. When programmed in this way Monteverdi’s revolutionary fusion of music, poetry, and drama regains the sense of novelty and theatrical power that astonished its first audiences.

Edward Elgar is often thought of as a conservative who celebrated English traditions in his Pomp and Circumstance Marches. But the composer Richard Strauss heard Elgar’s symphonic music and hailed him as adventurous and forward-looking: “the great English progressivist”. In masterpieces like The Dream of Gerontius and the 

Cello Concerto, Elgar took British music into the 20th century, but did his arguably repressed personality hold him back from creating a revolutionary new idiom? 

Nicholas Kenyon weighs the evidence for Elgar as the distinctive voice of British music.

In 2025 the Eusebius Quartet released their second album ‘Elgar & Faure’ featuring the solitary string quartets by each of these composers. The disc received high praise from Gramophone magazine, BBC music magazine, The Strad and others, reaching the top 10 in the Classical Music specialist charts. The Quartet last played at the Festival in 2021 when they combined with the Heath Quartet for Mendelssoh’s Octet, and we are delighted to welcome them back to Tetbury with this atmospheric programme

All are most welcome to St Marys' Church for the festival Eucharist.

The award-winning British vocal ensemble The Gesualdo Six makes their Tetbury debut  in 2026 with a poignant, hopeful sequence of sacred music containing radiant choral writing from across the centuries.  

Highlights include Tallis’s polyphonic masterpiece Absterge Domine, alongside the astonishing harmonies of Gesualdo in Plange quasi virgo. Both composers beautifully capture a sense of vulnerability in their works, asking for forgiveness and protection.

From more recent times, there are the poetic settings of Joanna Marsh and Richard Rodney Bennett, who call on us to enjoy all that life has to offer. Elsewhere, pieces by Tavener and Morales present a series of questions, seeking reassurance.

Chosen for our closing Sunday concert, this is an uplifting sequence for the souls of the departed.