‘Where there are violins there is hope’: The relaunched Red Violin festival

I founded the Red Violin festival with Yehudi Menuhin as patron in 1997. Inspired by Le Violon Rouge paintings by Pougny, Dufy and others, I had the idea to bring everything together across the arts celebrating the violin in its different guises. We had a very successful festival throughout Cardiff in partnership with the BBC and many other organisations over 10 days and the following year the Red Violin film came out so we showed that in the second festival. The 2007 festival was a collaboration with BBCNOW, as well as Cardiff University, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama. For it, I curated daily concerts at the Wales Millennium Centre and devised a giant violin which was on display as an installation throughout the festival. However, both festivals were a huge amount of work and, with all my performing and recording, I haven’t been able to present the Red Violin since.

Fast forward to five years ago, when I gave a recital as part of the University of Leeds International Concert Series where I was introduced to former Opera North chairman Michael Beverley who, when I told him about the Red Violin festival, said, ‘Why don’t we do it in Leeds?’ With the pandemic and the closure of Leeds Town Hall for conservation work, it’s taken five years to come to fruition, but we’re delighted that many of the arts organisations in the city have partnered with us and that Lord Michael Berkeley agreed to be our president.

What’s new in our relaunched festival is a collaboration with Opera North’s education department, In Harmony whose 10th anniversary we attended. It’s both impressive and poignant that they are filling the music education gap, enabling children in deprived areas who wouldn’t otherwise have access to music lessons to learn instruments. Having started learning the violin myself in free shared lessons in a junior school in Romford, Essex and then as a junior exhibitioner at the RCM, paid for by the local authority, this wouldn’t happen now, so this is dear to my heart. We’re programming Peter Maxwell Davies’s Sanday Tunes for a large group of young violinists to play at the upcoming festival. The work brings my career full circle in a way because my first job was as violinist/violist in Max’s groundbreaking group The Fires of London.

During my time as a Fulbright Scholar to New York I became friends with Gene Scheer (pictured below) – then a baritone, now a world-renowned librettist – who suggested we give the European première of his work with Jake Heggie, Intonations: Songs on the Violins of Hope (which the title quote of this feature is taken from) at this year’s festival. The piece, inspired by James A Grymes's book Violins of Hope: Violins of the Holocaust, Instruments of Hope and Liberation in Mankind's Darkest Hour, will be performed by the London Chamber Ensemble, violinist Chloe Hanslip and mezzo soprano Sian Griffiths. The incorporation of string quartets is a new element for the 2024 festival. In the other half of their concert, the London Chamber Ensemble’s Quartet and I will launch our album of Howells and Wood Quartets for SOMM.

Wanting to make the festival as inclusive (and fun) as possible, in partnership with Leeds Conservatoire we came up with A HundRED Violins of all ages and abilities in a new piece to be performed as a Flashmob in Leeds’s Trinity shopping centre, supported by the Leche Trust. This year we build on the presence of Indian Carnatic Violin in previous iterations of the festival with an evening of both North and South Indian violin in collaboration with Leeds’s South Asian Arts. Leeds International Concert Season were happy to feature the violin in four of their concerts, from violin and organ to Anglo-French quartets, Roma violin and jazz-inspired pieces.

With the support of the Vaughan Williams Foundation, I was able to commission a new work from James B Wilson (pictured below). Love is Sleeping for violin and piano will be premiered on 18 October at Leeds University’s Clothworkers’ Centenary Concert Hall – where the idea for this venture originated in 2019.

Inspired by my time as artistic director of Music in Quiet Places, during which we had guided walks of the villages before the concerts in rural churches, we’re partnering with Leeds City Walking Tours to create a violin soundtrack relating to parts of Leeds. This can be heard on two guided walks during the Festival, and includes  Paganini and Sarasate who both played in Leeds. 

In earlier festivals, I didn’t play a concerto, but I love the Bruch Violin Concerto so I’m very pleased to have been asked by the Sinfonia of Leeds to join them and their director David Greed in the festival’s grand finale where Greed and his son will also perform Vivaldi Double Concerto. I like the fact that this festival celebrates local people as well as being international in flavour.

We were sadly unsuccessful with an Arts Council England application, so a lot of work has been done voluntarily and we are now a registered charity. Economically it’s sound, having ‘umbrella’ events within the Red Violin which are mutually beneficial, enhancing existing series, without the risk of promoting ‘from scratch’ for most events. The 2024 Red Violin festival is therefore presented in partnership with Leeds International Concert Season, University of Leeds International Concert Series, South Asian Arts, Leeds Conservatoire, In Harmony Opera North, Everyman Cinema, Leeds City Walking Tours, Sinfonia of Leeds, Hobgoblin Music and Leeds Libraries.

Violinist Madeleine Mitchell is artistic director of the Red Violin Festival which is set to take place in Leeds from 14 to 19 October