Festival 2016

A morning of music for the youngest of audiences, and their grown-ups! Come and hear live music, meet real instruments, and respond to their different sounds and moods.

New Paths is delighted to team up with Hull University to offer its music students masterclass opportunities with New Paths performers. In this masterclass, a handful of performers will have the chance to work on chamber music and solo performance.

Researcher, writer and presenter Katy Hamilton gives us an introduction to the complex musical and personal triangle of Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms.

Simon Johnson and Richard Pinel give a showcase of the magnificent Hull City Hall organ followed by a public masterclass with students Benjamin Newlove, Anthony Daly and Robbie Carroll. A special opportunity to witness close up the talented young organists receiving inspirational coaching, and to discover this spectacular instrument.

A French perfume wafts across Beverley with this lunchtime programme of favourites and hidden gems: song and instrumental music ranging from haunting Duruflé and Poulenc to popular Fauré.

Following our War Commemoration concert, take a moment to reflect in the 13th-century surroundings of the Minster. The Queen's Six, singers from Windsor Castle, lead us in a service of compline, used for 1500 years as the last, contemplative service of the day.

This joyful morning of music celebrates some of the great Viennese composers, Schubert, Brahms and Mozart, in some of their sunniest writing.

New Paths is delighted to team up with The University of Hull to offer its music students masterclass opportunities with New Paths performers. In this masterclasses, selected singers will have the chance to work on operatic performance.

Some of the UK's most exciting young opera stars, fresh from the stages of English National Opera and the Royal Opera House, sing us a programme of operatic meetings and partings, with extracts from operas including Don Giovanni, La Bohème and La Traviata.

Have a drink in the East Riding Theatre bar after the Opera Gala, and be serenaded by the charming Queen's Six as they make you laugh and cry in lewd madrigals, haunting folk songs and upbeat jazz and pop arrangements.

Well-known to local audiences as an esteemed professor at the University of Hull, and to international audiences as a leading Shakespeare music scholar, Professor Christopher R Wilson here gives us an insight into Shakespeare in English Romantic Song, ahead of our Shakespeare Celebration at 3:30pm.

Settings by Haydn, Quilter, Dove, Schubert, Poulenc, and Finzi of Shakespeare texts mark the 400th anniversary of the playwright's death. Interspersed with these songs are Shakespeare readings, and Benjamin Britten's Lachyrmae for viola and piano.

For our closing concert we return to Schumann and Brahms, where the New Paths idea began. One of the best-loved song cycles, Dichterliebe, is paired with Brahms' magnificent B major piano trio, in a concert of true greats.