Cuckfield Music Festival promises a sparkling programme for 2023

Horsham Symphony Orchestra open the festival on Saturday, June 17 at 7pm. Their concert will feature BBC Young Musician percussion finalist Toril Azzalini-Machecler performing Concerto for Marimba and Strings by Emmanuel Sejourne, which will be followed by Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique. The night will be conducted by Steve Dummer.

The week continues with: Sunday, June 18, 6pm – Festival Choral Evensong; Monday, June 19, 1pm – Burgess Hill Girls; Tuesday, June 20, 1pm – Caroline Tyler; Tuesday, June 20, 6pm – Schools’ concert: Oathall Community College, St Paul’s Catholic College and Warden Park Academy; Wednesday, June 21, 1pm – Rebecca Milford, Eleanor Oldfield and Janice Kit-ying Tsui; Thursday, June 22, 1pm – Lucy Jeal and Ahmed Dickinson; Thursday, June 22, 7pm – Simon Anckorn and Sarah Rolph; Friday, June 23, 1pm – Michael Maine; Friday, June 23, 7pm – Greek Serenade with Pavlos Carvalho and Friends; and Saturday, June 24, 7pm – Dominic Ferris with soloist Luca Brugnoli.

For the closing concert, Dominic is delighted to be returning to Cuckfield Music Festival for a third time, performing his trademark piano arrangements of songs from the British and US songbooks including Billy Joel, Elton John and Gershwin.

"And for one night only, Dominic will invite the audience to request any song they would like, live during the concert. Dominic will also be welcoming special guest Luca Brugnoli, who was the runner-up in BBC Young Chorister and had an album out in May.

You can buy tickets online with no extra charges or booking fees and print them at home to save postage at www.ticketsource.co.uk/cuckfieldmusicfest For venue details, see website.

Spokesman David Curtis-Brignell is delighted at the programme that has come together: “It is a question of giving people of all ages the opportunity to enjoy professional musicians and give people the chance to enjoy all different styles of music and all different genres and perhaps to step out of their comfort zone, but to do so at an affordable price.

"It is a lot less expensive to come to a concert at Cuckfield than it is to go to London where you could be paying up to £70 for a ticket and then of course you would have the travelling costs on top. Also one of the things we are very keen to do is to give young musicians the opportunity to perform as well and that's what we are doing at this year's festival.”

David feels the festival has come back strongly post-pandemic: “For a lot of festivals it's really quite a struggle. It has cost about £14,000 to stage this which we aim to cover through ticket sales and sponsorship and our Friends scheme.

"We give our Friends a couple of weeks of priority booking and things are going well. You have a bit of a burst when you first put the tickets on sale and then things go quiet and then you hope that things will pick up again as you get closer. Success would be to break even. Real success would be to enable us to have a surplus so that we can move on to the next thing that we want to do which is to launch a scheme to support young people in the area that have got the talent in music but whose families are not able to support them with music lessons financially. That's the big goal for us. We would love to get to the point where we can commit to supporting schools with this.”