BREMF@home – across the EARTH

Brighton Early Music Festival (BREMF) won’t be dampened by any pandemic! The music may be wonderfully antique but over the years BREMF has met many often daunting challenges by pioneering some really ingenious technologies that have delivered world-class performances to its ever-growing and expectant audiences. This year of course BREMF is smaller than usual and very different, with some unfamiliar venues, difficult constraints and strange acoustics, but it still promises to deliver its celebrated impact!

Deborah Roberts and the BREMF team have curated “a series of 10 individually devised programmes, merging performance with film, images, animation and presentation, offering something different that can also reach across the earth”, which is just as well because the internet audience is truly international and this year’s theme is global.

Piers Adams filming Bird Charmer at Woods Mill

Each event starts on YouTube at the listed date and time, and is then available again for catch-up any time during the following week.

Most of the artists are already well established favourites of the loyal BREMF audience; many are alumni of the excellent BREMF LIVE! mentoring scheme for young performers but as usual these old friends are likely to come along with plenty of surprises. Some of the concerts promise to be exhilarating or even exhausting, others will be ethereal, and no doubt there will be some wonderfully odd events too. How, I wonder, will The Society of Strange and Ancient Instruments manage a full concert with the extraordinary Trumpet Marine, it has such an unexpected, complex timbre?

A Consort of Trumpets Marine

The BREMF website gives full listings, introductions and plenty of free preview material that showcases just how well all these accomplished artists have adapted to preparing high-quality remote performances for YouTube presentation.

The festival runs from 7pm on Friday 23rd October until Sunday 1st November (8th catch-up) and obviously is open to all. In line with the BREMF inclusive ethos, in which children have always participated for free, the payment is on trust (but it is really important because these musicians have been so very badly hit by the pandemic).

YouTube,
23 October/ 1 November 2020
Rating:
Andrew Connal