Tamsin was appointed Artistic Director of the Two Moors Festival in 2020.
The Two Moors Festival will take place between the 5th and 15th October 2023, bringing together artists from all over the world to explore the theme of “Home”. Find out more at the Two Moors Festival website here.
A few words about this year’s Festival from Tamsin –
This year’s programme explores the theme of “Home”. As you may have noticed if you’ve attended the last couple of festivals, I search for themes which I feel are universally binding. While a sense of Home likely means something different to every one of us, it’s presence, or lack thereof, is surely one of the most essential elements in each of our lives.
I had a variety of starting points when choosing this theme to work with this year; a renewed interest in how the so called Classical genre absorbs all other genres, world, jazz, folk, popular, and all the fuzzy and tantalising areas that sit between the boxes of categorisation (which led to inviting the Swingles, combining Haydn and Scottish folksong, programming Bartok, Ravel, Debussy and Brahms); my personal thoughts about what home means, as its purpose and a sense of creating a home and its importance took on new dimensions since becoming a mother (again Debussy, Poulenc, Purcell, Bach, Schubert, Britten); my ongoing awareness of the huge refugee crisis, certainly the biggest in our modern history, and what it might mean to lose your home, and to try to rebuild it (our Festival commission from Deborah Pritchard and works by Bloch, Vaughan-Williams and Tchaikovsky); and the new focus on home in the popular conscience and media since the pandemic, for example with WFH becoming the new normal and the surrounding discussions (Gavin Plumley’s wonderful new book, A Home for All Seasons, reflecting his perspective as cultural historian on our changing relationship with our physical homes through the ages).
We’re looking ahead to the 2024 Honeymead Festival, which will take place in May, with pianist Cordelia Williams. More news soon!