Folk music exploring people and place

Folk music is a celebration of culture, of people and place, of the shared stories that unite us. This year, we’ve pulled unique sounds from distant corners of the globe, each programme providing a new and contrasting flavour of folk-inspired music.

Our festival begins with Dispersion, exploring the intersection where folk music meets classical music. We hear Sergei Prokofiev’s Kabardinian String Quartet, inspired by the local folk music of Nalchik in the Northern Caucasus of Russia. In Out of Doors, Three Rondos on Slovak Folk Tunes is music that Béla Bartók discovered on his travels collecting and documenting folk melodies. Equinox further explores folk influences in classical music, before Refraction takes us back to Bartók’s Contrasts for violin, clarinet and piano. This work explores the expressive range of these instruments, incorporating jazz influences alongside Hungarian and Romanian dance melodies.

Ængles brings us to Wānaka, exploring the melting pot of folk influences that defined the sound of 20th-century United Kingdom. Finally, Prism celebrates a place where artists of all disciplines often crossed paths, Vienna’s Gasthaus Zum Roten Igel (The Red Hedgehog Inn). Famously, this is where regular patrons Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schubert and Schumann were truly exposed to folk music.

A meeting of minds and cultures

Music lives where cultures collide. This year’s programme is a melting pot of cultural influences, beginning at Te Atamira, the beating heart and creative confluence of Queenstown. Here, Dispersion and later Refraction feature European and Asian folk-inspired works, from the local folk music of Nalchik in Russia heading east to Bright Sheng’s Concertino, which explores and preserves the sounds of his Asian heritage.

Fantazi opens with a work by Paul Schoenfeld, each movement based on different Chassidic Eastern European melodies. The programme continues with a captivating clarinet quintet by Osvaldo Golijov, influenced by the Judaic languages of Aramaic, Yiddish and Hebrew. Out of Doors brings a uniquely piano-focused programme journeying through folk-inspired music, starting in Hungary and looking westward with folk songs, ancient and contemporary, from England to the USA. 

A new sound with Klezmer

This year, AWE returns once again to Bannockburn with the sounds of a new style of music for the festival: Klezmer. Fantazi draws on folk music’s connection to land and language with a programme heavily featuring the clarinet, the most common melody instrument in Klezmer, likely favoured because of its ability to emulate the human voice and the Cantor’s songs and prayers in Synagogue.