End of an era for Bath Mozartfest

2025 is the 35th anniversary year of Bath Mozartfest, and it will also be the final festival programmed by the peerless Amelia Freedman, CBE, FRAM, its artistic director for more than thirty years, who sadly died in July.

Amelia had decided to step down as artistic director of Bath Mozartfest and announced earlier this year that November’s Mozartfest would be her last.  She had programmed it entirely before she became seriously unwell and had planned to be present at the festival, and attend a dinner celebrating the 35th Anniversary and her long and successful tenure as its artistic director. Sadly it will be her musical swansong.

Image: Bath Mozartfest

Amelia’s final programme is as inspiring and invigorating as ever, brimming with musical delights new and familiar.  This year there are Bath debuts for the Schumann Quartet, who open the festival, with Mozart of course; the Consone Quartet; the Carducci String Quartet and the Castalian String Quartet.

The Hallé orchestra returns to Bath with Sir Mark Elder, now its Conductor Emeritus, and a programme featuring music from Sibelius and Dvorák, plus Dame Imogen Cooper playing Mozart’s final, beautifully poetic, Piano Concerto No 27.

The Nash Ensemble, the group that Amelia founded sixty years ago, has long been a Bath favourite and will make its 2025 Mozartfest appearance with a programme ranging from Mozart via Mendelssohn to Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Piano music abounds with Cédric Tiberghien, here playing Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations; Imogen Cooper will take to the stage for a second performance with Henning Kraggerud (violin) and Adrian Brendel (cello); and there is the outstanding piano duo of Philip Moore and Simon Crawford-Phillips, two acclaimed soloists who have performed together since 1995, affording them a remarkable musical empathy.  And Simon Crawford-Phillips will appear again with the German-Romanian baritone Konstantin Krimmel performing Schubert’s bleak but heart-wrenchingly beautiful Winterreise.

Travelling back across the centuries, Tenebrae’s concert celebrates the English Glories of the Sixteenth Century, whilst Jennifer Pike’s programme includes the rarely performed, Nocturne by Lili Boulanger, whose musical promise was cut short by her death at just 24.

This wide-ranging 9-day, 15 concert festival with Mozart at its heart perfectly illustrates Amelia’s extraordinary gift for creative programming, always appealing but gently encouraging audiences to broaden their musical horizons. She will be much missed by Bath audiences.

Bath Mozartfest 2025 will end, appropriately, with Mozart’s Great C minor Mass in Bath Abbey, with La Nuova Musica conducted by David Bates, followed by a celebratory dinner to honour Amelia Freedman (November 1940 - July 2025) and this remarkable festival to which she contributed so much.