The 2018 Festival Experience

The Searchers

The Searchers‘ remarkable career continues! With such classic hits as, Sweets For My Sweet; Needles and Pins; Don’t Throw Your Love Away; Sugar and Spice and When You Walk In The Room, they have contributed to establishing the UK as the world’s leading nation in the music industry. There is no doubt that the decade that gave us The Beatles as well as The Searchers, along with many other bands, was a very special period, and it will go down in history as being one of the most innovative times for musical creativity and self-expression. With total record sales in excess of 50 million, The Searchers still have great appeal to audiences of all ages. They tour the globe as much today as they have done throughout a fantastic career spanning five decades! Their special ‘solo’ concert was a highly entertaining show which has been enthusiastically and warmly received throughout the world. Combining anecdotes and reminiscences, this fully self-contained concert includes all their famous hits, plus many album recordings, B-sides and a selection of other collector and well known favourites.

Jacobson-Brown Duo

Since their formation in 2011, the piano duo of Julian Jacobson and Mariko Brown has established itself as an ensemble of rare distinction, vitality and originality. Following their critically acclaimed debut in the Beethoven Piano Society of Europe’s Summer Festival in July 2011, they have given many concerts in venues including Southbank Purcell Room (2014 & 2015, and returning in March 2019), St John’s Smith Square, Fairfield Halls, Blackheath Halls, Royal Academy of Music (‘Music Past and Present’ series), the Lower Machen Festival, Markson’s Bösendorfer series, Warwick University, Brighton Fringe Festival, and at venues in Birmingham, Manchester, Oxford, Cambridge and Bristol. Abroad they have performed in Madeira at the Teatro Municipal, and they perform annually in France in the festival ‘Rencontres Musicales en Eygalières’.

Stacey Kent

Since 2003 and Stacey Kent‘s breakthrough album ‘The Boy Next Door’, Stacey’s repertoire has also broadened to include originals written specially for her by Booker Prize winning novelist, Kazuo Ishiguro and her husband and saxophonist Jim Tomlinson. Her platinum-selling, Grammy-nominated ‘Breakfast On The Morning Tram’ (Blue Note/EMI, 2007), was described in Jazz Times as a “marvellously inventive launching pad for this bold, brave new Kent”. This was followed by ‘Raconte-Moi’ (Blue Note/EMI, 2010), Kent’s first live album ‘Dreamer in Concert’ (Blue Note/EMI, 2011), and ‘The Changing Lghts’ (Warner Music, 2013).With career sales exceeding 2 million albums, Stacey’s 11th studio album, ‘I Know I Dream’, is a highlight not only for its breathtaking beauty but also for its assured expressiveness. The Album follows ‘Tenderly’ (2015), an intimate collaboration with Brazilian music master, Robert Menescal. Stacey’s previous albums include, the Brazilian-flavored, ‘The Changing Lights’, (2013), ‘Dreamer In Concert’ (2011), recorded live in Paris at La Cigale, her all-French, ‘Raconte-moi’ (2010), and the Platinum-selling, Grammy nominated, ‘Breakfast on the Morning Tram’