It's a Georgian market town. It's very beautiful. It sits with the beacons all around it so pretty much anywhere in town you can see them and is one of those. It feels a little bit end of the roadie. So it's one of those places that so far has escaped too much mainstream uniformity, so it's still Higgledy Piggledy we have lots of independent shops, lovely cafes and restaurants and hotels. And all of them have maintained their own sort of local character.
There's a lovely feel in Brecon, it used to have us have a market agricultural market right in the middle and and and that's gone but oddly, the farm feel about Brecon hasn't gone. It's still very much about the people that live and work here and around and in the mountains.
Well, I've lived in Brighton for 20 years and since 2006 have been part of the Brecon Baroque festival team. It was founded by Rachel Podger and her partner, Tim Cronin, and since then has been run by a core committee, and we bring international musicians to Brecon for a long weekend every October. So we take over four or five venues around Brechin, the cathedral, Theatr Trycheiniog, and also the plough chapel and occasionally Christ college Brecon, and we stage concerts.
Rachel Podger is the artistic director. She is no stranger to those in the music industry, one of our most prodigious talents worldwide, and she invites fellow musicians from all over the world that she has worked with, and they stage a series of concerts between Thursday and Monday. We also have a lovely educational aspect to the festival. So we work very closely with South Powys youth music and also with the Royal Welsh College of drama in Cardiff and bring in young musicians and young rising stars to incorporate into the festival.
As well, and we top it up with talks and with walks into the mountains. And so it's a very lovely, long weekend of music making and, and celebration of Brecon. Well Rachel lives in Brecon. So that's how it all began. And she is a baroque musician, which means that she is a specialist in a very specific period of music. So the violin that she plays is a baroque instrument and the repertoire that she plays is all from the baroque era. And because she lives in Brecon and wanted to bring her music here, it was just a nice ring, the Brecon Baroque Festival. It just had a nice alliteration and, and that's how it began. So I suppose it's its starting point really was the music and what she plays and what she plays it on. And then from there after it's, it's grown into Brecon Baroque Festival. Yeah.
And it's very, I mean, it's it's a very specific sort of period and repertoire and the pitch of the music for example, is is different from the normal classical repertoire. And otherwise the instruments sound very lively. They sound very...very, very fresh to the ear, I suppose. So, a violin will sound like a violin but it has a different kind of resonance. Rachel's violin has gut strings, for example. So they're not that sort of metallic sound you get with a classical instrument with the guts string gives them a very, as the word sounds, gives them a very gutty sound and it's it's a really terrific bright sort of sound that that everybody loves and, and all of all of the music that Rachel plays is has been a bit of an education for us all actually, she's introduced us to, to repertoire and to musicians and to composers that we might not have heard before.
And many instruments too have come to the festival which may not have come to record beforeViola Da Gamba's and this year we have a trumpet Marina coming which is a very unusual Tromba Marina very unusual instrument. All part of the Baroque era.
(Interviewer: can you describe a Tromba Marina)
Yes, of course it was. It used to be played by ladies in the convent that couldn't sing.
I can't remember exactly when maybe 15th century. First of all, I don't know. Anyway, it's a very long, sort of like a great big horn you'd find in the Alps, that's what it looks like, but it is actually a stringed instrument. And it makes an extraordinary sound. like nothing you've ever really heard before that the idea that it was a better sound than the non singing is interesting, but you know.
And Claire Salomon brings the Tromba Marina to us with her group called the society of ancient. society of strange and ancient instruments. She's been to the festival before and she returns next year, not not this year 2020 but 2021 she returns.
And she is she's brilliant and has this whole collection this army of wonderful instruments, hurdy gurdy' s and Nyckelharpa's and and they are typical of the of the era of instruments that we wouldn't otherwise have seen. I think the overriding special thing about Brecon is that I don't think any of us could envisage the caliber of musicians that come to us that autumn every year and just blow our socks off. Rachel has been incredibly brave with what she's wanted to stage and who she's invited to come here and play for us. And every single year without fail, we are blown away. I think probably one of the highlights for me is it's a mixture actually there's on the one side doing live broadcasts from the theatre for BBC Radio three. But then on the other end of the scale, having very very young people sitting next to probably one of the biggest stars in the world, playing the violin alongside them and, and picking up tips and sort of open mouthed and it's very, It's very inclusive and it's and it's artistic pedigree is extraordinary.
We thought it didn't go pass us by that we were inviting people into the into bracket every single year. It's a sellout I might say the festival every year, from as far afield as Japan and Australia and America and a lot of Europeans come as well. And we suddenly thought that the loveliest thing about Brecon is these mountains all around us, and we should incorporate them somehow into the festival. So we began a walk every Monday of the festival, which has a starting point, we got for a couple of hours, and then maybe finished with a lunch, little soup before the next concert. So it was a way to start to introduce people to where we are. And we've also done tours of some of the venues so Christ College Brecon, for example, has a phenomenal history. King Henry the eighth history and so we do a little walks around the chapel in the dining hall there which are very beautiful. And so it's kind of gone from there and and every year we have more and more walkers and more and more people arrive with their boots and off we go and it's become part of the part of the thing to tie in this extraordinary countryside with the music and make it a very Brecon experience.
Well I live in between Brecon and Crickhowell and a little place called Bwlch which has got no vowels in it. Brecon has been my home now for 20 years. Following a great tradition of Gedges who have been based at Brecon Cathedral were based around Cathedral for over 40 years.
I married into this very musical family, and I absolutely love Brecon. The mountains are my place. That's where I head. But it's a very, very special place. We're very lucky to be here and can't imagine living in anywhere else now.
I think it's that you can within about 25 minutes walk to a place in Bracken where the view is probably not changed since the Iron Age. So you can be standing on a hill looking at the mountains amongst you know in the countryside amongst all the flora and fauna that's some of it exclusive to Brecon and and feel a great sense of um peace really that life goes on whatever's happening. This place has stayed the same all this time and it's um it's it's oddly comforting.