Now in its 41st incarnation, the Ryedale festival spreads its events around 30 venues along the southern edge of the North York Moors national park. The pianist Christopher Glynn is its current artistic director; there’s real flair in his programming, which artfully mixes the familiar with the more challenging. This year’s festival included six world premieres, alongside emphases on the music of Handel and, in his 150th-anniversary year, Vaughan Williams.
Vaughan Williams, more specifically the inspiration and spiritual rewards he took from the natural world, was also the starting point for the festival’s most ambitious new work. Julian Philips’s, Looking West, to a text by Rebecca Hurst, weaves together three elements. The story of the Celtic saint Bega, who fled her native Ireland to avoid marriage to a Viking chief, and found sanctuary in what is now Cumbria, is counterpointed with the journey of a young man today retracing Bega’s journey through the fells, while Winifred Nicholson’s paintings of the coastline of the Lake District provide another layer.
