The 2025 Lewes Chamber Music Festival will take place from June 13-15 with events and concerts in the intimate settings of St John sub Castro church, St Michael’s Church, and the Depot Cinema in Lewes.
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00:00Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. It's lovely
00:06this afternoon to speak to Beatrice Phillips. Now, Beatrice, you are the Artistic Director
00:10and the Founder of the Lewis Chamber Music Festival, which is a lovely weekend event,
00:16which has been going well since 2012. You must be so proud of the thing that you have
00:22created, which has survived and is still going so strong.
00:25Yes, hello. I am really proud of it, actually. There are a lot of chamber music festivals
00:33around all over the country, and I'm really proud that I created one in Lewis where I grew
00:41up, which has stayed relatively the same in its format since 2012, but has gradually grown
00:48and become more and more recognised. And actually, one of the really nice things is that a lot
00:54of the musicians who came right at the beginning, their careers have really blossomed and they
01:00still come back. Yeah, they still come back again and again to Lewis because they've sort
01:04of, well, they've fallen in love with the festival, but also the town, which is nice.
01:09It must be lovely to have that longevity so far, which is brilliant. But the fact is you
01:14started it because, as you said, you had the chamber music bug. Now, why is chamber music so
01:19special to you then? Oh, yeah, I guess it's mainly because it's a chance to discover, well, first
01:31of all, some of the best music I think ever written is chamber music. And it seems to be a format
01:39that composers use to kind of express their innermost thoughts and their most risky, their most risky
01:48music. And, yeah, most radical music as well. I think there's something about it being not an
01:55orchestra or an opera or something huge, where they feel the kind of freedom to experiment and try things
02:02out. And so it's, it's a huge joy to then discover and explore that music with a small
02:09number of fellow musicians and who usually end up being, you know, your friends and you become
02:15really close to these people.
02:17And it sounds like you have lots to draw on then. There's a lot of unused repertoire, isn't there? Or neglected repertoire, isn't there?
02:26Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And that's actually, that's one of the things I take great pleasure in, in doing. And Lewis is, right from the beginning, I was giving people sort of Schoenberg and Catois and Bartok and things which they might not even have heard of, but programming them alongside, you know, really beloved masterpieces like Schubert Quintet and, and other things. So, so they kind of go on these journeys and are,
02:56kind of exposed to stuff that they might not have chosen necessarily to listen to previously. And it seems to have, like, well, it seems to be popular enough and people, I think, have come to expect that now at Lewis.
03:09Absolutely. Well, it's fabulously cool, isn't it, to create your very own chamber music festival in New York town. Congratulations on your success so far. And really lovely to speak to you. Thank you.
03:21Thanks.