BRADFIELD MUSIC FESTIVAL
The award-winning Bradfield Festival of Music is an annual celebration of classical music performed in the Parish Church of St Nicholas’, a historic 12th century church set in the beautiful landscape of High Bradfield, Sheffield within the Peak District National Park.
Due to Covid 19 the 2020 Festival has had to be cancelled. In normal times the Sheffield Music Hub award winners Victor Baycroft and Kate Thickett would have performed a recital at the festival and received a small cheque and a certificate signed by Julian Lloyd Webber. This year they have performed digitally and you can see details of our two award winners and their performances below by clicking on the links below:
Victor Baycroft Kate Thickett
The 2021 Festival will be our 23rd Festival since its revival in 1998; evidence from the Bradfield Parish archives shows that a music festival was held in the Parish Church on Whit Monday in 1813, 1825 and 1835. Little did those festival organisers of 200 years ago know that a week-long festival would be happening in the same church today.
During the first two years of the revived Festival the programme was largely comprised of performances by locally based musicians and singers. New ground was broken in 2000 when, for the first time, the Lindsay String Quartet was engaged as the “headline act”. Following that experience the Festival began to include better known artists in its programmes and in 2004 Julian Lloyd Webber, now the Festival’s President, performed for the first time at Bradfield.
The Festival now attracts the finest artists from all over the world who collectively perform a wide range of music genres within the classical tradition. There is a strong connection between the Festival and young musicians and annual awards are presented to the two most promising young musicians based at the Sheffield Music Hub. As well as prize money, the Award Winners are given the opportunity to perform at one of the concerts.
