Adrian Brendel presents his first Bath Mozartfest
Adrian Brendel takes up the role of Artistic Director of Bath Mozartfest this November. His first programme combines the festival’s established chamber-music tradition with a focus on young performers and educational projects. He discusses his aims for the festival and his work with Tree of Strings and the Nash Ensemble
How did you come to take on the role of Artistic Director at Bath Mozartfest?
I’d already visited the festival many times as part of the Nash Ensemble, so I’d built up a good relationship with the Bath audience. When Amelia Freedman decided to step down as Artistic Director a couple of years ago, the chairman got in touch. He knew I was just down the road in Dorset and asked what I thought they could do for the festival’s future. I gave them some ideas, and one thing led to another.
What are your plans for the festival?
Part of my remit is to broaden the reach: to get it out to more people, bring in more educational events, and broaden what happens under the banner of Mozartfest. Does it always have to be mainly about Mozart, or can you take some of his character traits and head in different musical directions, like Beethovenfest does in Bonn? I like that as a premise. It gives you a much bigger canvas and more possibilities for themes and strands.
As this year is my first Mozartfest, I haven’t tried to be particularly radical, but to be as organic as possible with what came before. One of the themes is youth, both through young musicians and programming some of Mozart’s younger works. We’re inviting talented musicians from the YCAT and BBC New Generation Artist schemes, bringing them into the fabric of the festival.
It’s important to develop local connections. The Bath Abbey concert (14 November) is a collaboration with local institutions, including Bath Abbey Choir, with a local chorister, Ruth Williams, singing some of the solos. The orchestra features conservatoire players, side-by-side with the Nash Ensemble.
I’ve also tried to broaden the repertoire, including, for example, a celebration of György Kurtág’s 100th birthday (18 November), with students from the Royal Academy of Music. His music is rooted in the Classical canon and when I studied with him, he often talked about Mozart. That’s the beginning of trying to look in different directions, more than in the past, and not necessarily including Mozart in every programme, but having a sense of him all the way through.
What have you learnt about running festivals from your experience with Mozartfest, and before that, Plush Festival?
You start with a framework, a rough idea of what you want to do, and then allow things to trickle in, shaping and forming them as you go. You need people you can collaborate with well and a team that isn’t too rigid. If you’re lucky enough to have that, it can be great. I love teamwork and working with people, creating things with a certain amount of osmosis, as well as intellectual design. It’s important not to be a control freak. Delegate, and trust the people you’re working with to make good decisions.
Sometimes you have to be clear that something isn’t working and be decisive about it, but there’s never one single way to do things. You have so many balls in the air and try your best to keep everything in balance. There’s a quote, sometimes attributed to Churchill: ‘Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.’ Within a festival, lots goes right and a few things don’t, and you end up obsessing about those, but they’re never that bad. You chip away every year and develop a feel for your audience and the place you’re in. Every festival is unique, and it takes time to understand and mould each one. It’s fascinating. I love it.
When you choose musicians for the festival, what do you look for?
I don't have too fixed an idea about this. A common thread is that I admire them all in one way or another. I love to be in a performance where a masterpiece is recreated as if for the first time, no matter how well you know the work. This year’s festival is full of musicians who understand the importance of this. I’m also drawn to musicians who are imaginative with their programming and search for new contexts and connections between works. Amelia Freedman used to say that you want different flavours and personalities.
My father died last year, and I was very close to him, so this felt like an important moment to bring together Imogen Cooper, Paul Lewis and Till Fellner, because they were my father’s three closest pianistic friends, students and allies. They’re all great artists with their own voices. There are other musicians who were connected with my father, including the violinists Stephen Waarts and Viviane Hagner.
What did you learn about Mozart from your father, Alfred Brendel?
He wasn’t frightened to sing and to speak in Mozart, and really to characterise it. He got away from playing Mozart on eggshells – porcelain Mozart. I grew up with that kind of Mozart, and I think about it when I play chamber music. Today you often hear Mozart played in historically informed contexts, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but ideas about style can become a burden. People are sometimes frightened to express themselves in Mozart. You have to have the courage to play this music well and not get too hung up by these things.
I didn’t actually play much Mozart with my father, other than a one-off project for his 70th birthday, performing the piano quartets, which was memorable. He never did too much or too little. His distillation process was so refined that he found just the right amounts of everything: singing and speaking, and range of character, but always within the perfection of form that Mozart conjured up. It was fantastic to be part of that process.
I’m obsessed with his recordings of Mozart concertos with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. They’re still one of my favourite bodies of recorded work. I love the way he moulded the Mozart sound, both in the orchestra and with his own playing.
You started Tree of Strings this year. Can you explain the scheme?
Tree of Strings has three aims. First, to bring high-quality education projects into local schools, specifically in areas of concern, where there’s limited access to arts subjects. Second, to support talented young musicians at the start of their careers. We’ve just launched an artists’ programme for musicians between the ages of 18 and 30. Successful applicants will perform their own concert, play side-by-side with people like me, take part in our summer festival, and do outreach work in schools. The third aim is to build a roster of inspiring locations in Dorset and, gradually, neighbouring counties, where we can present concerts with young artists alongside more established ones. These are the three overlapping circles.
What does Tree of Strings’ education work look like?
At our inaugural festival this year, in early July, we began with a performance by 250 children from seven local schools, including two SEND schools. They prepared a programme called Sea of Songs, rooted in the history of Abbotsbury and its 900-year-old Tithe Barn, with its history of monks, threshing, fishing and all sorts of things. They created an incredible musical storyline.
The educators come from different musical backgrounds. One has a Brazilian music background, which is very rhythm-based; another comes from an orchestral background. We’re trying to start from scratch with Year Fives and the fundamentals of rhythm. The work is very creative and participatory. That’s at the heart of what we’re doing, because it’s important to involve children right from the beginning of the creative process, allowing them to take part in every element.
We’re also trying to support the children who want to carry on studying. In rural areas, it’s particularly hard, because many teachers have left the field as music education has declined. There are instruments available here and there, but a lot have been stockpiled in random places because schools got rid of them when there was no interest, and funding fell away. There are teachers who want to help, so we’re developing a group of them, and we have twenty or thirty children who want to learn instruments, which is a great start.
What do you find rewarding about working with younger musicians?
I’ve taught for the best part of 20 years, and it’s given me a great deal. You learn from your students, as well as them learning from you. When I was young, going to places like Prussia Cove and doing side-by-side projects with great musicians fast-tracked my learning. It’s exciting when you’re thrust into a group with people who have much more experience than you, who have played the piece many more times. With the right kind of osmosis, a lot can happen between musicians without even needing to talk.
As the more experienced musician, you try to enable younger musicians to flourish, rather than spoon-feeding them. That would be patronising and wrong. They often bring things to the music that you might not have thought of. In these moments, they learn so much very quickly – it’s experience fast-tracked.
When you’re young, you’re still building your ideas. There’s so much chaos: one person tells you the opposite of what someone else has said. That’s part of that stage of life. You don’t want to be too set in your ways yet, but to absorb things, grow and be inspired. Chamber music gives you the opportunity to do all of that, because you work with so many people. You learn to take distance from your own ideas so you can absorb other people’s. That’s one of the most important things and it takes time, but slowly, it enables you to collaborate better.
Since 2025 you have been Co-Artistic Director of the Nash Ensemble. What does that involve?
The Nash is a lovely family; playing with it feels like coming home. I’m now working with Simon Crawford-Phillips to guide the Nash Ensemble through the next few years. It’s a great group and needs a bit of new paint, so we have a new website and are looking to the future. We’ve renewed our ensemble-in-residence status at Wigmore Hall for the next few years and we’re building our concert activities around that. We’re building up more side-by-side work with young players, which is a key strategy.
We’re also developing Nash Two, a young version of the group, which will begin in 2028. People will apply, and the successful candidates will form a second Nash Ensemble that we mentor at festivals and academies, in side-by-side concerts at Wigmore and elsewhere. Gradually, we’ll bring those young musicians into the main group’s concerts. It’s a way of looking to the future.
Bath Mozartfest runs from 13 to 21 November, opening with two concerts by the Nash Ensemble. Paul Lewis performs his Mozart Plus programme of Mozart, Schubert and Chopin on 17 November, and the following evening, Brendel joins Till Fellner and Viviane Hagner for a chamber concert of works by Liszt, Schubert, Bach and Haydn
