Hexham Abbey Festival to Crown the Abbey's 1,350th Anniversary Year

There can be few better ways to mark a milestone thirteen and a half centuries in the making than with four days of music at the heart of the town. The Hexham Abbey Festival of Music and Arts runs from 26 to 29 September, and this year it carries extra weight: it is the centrepiece of a year-long celebration of the 1,350th anniversary of the Abbey's foundation in 674 AD.

Founded in 1953, the festival is one of the longest-running events of its kind in the region. For the anniversary edition, joint artistic director Martin Hughes said, "We have concerts for all tastes with superb artists coming to sing, play, and entertain throughout our four-day festival."

The programme opens in a fitting way for a community milestone. A newly commissioned work by local songwriter Fiona Lander has been created with around 200 pupils from local schools, who took part in singing workshops in the run-up to the festival. Their performance is a free event on the morning of Thursday 26 September, putting the next generation of Hexham voices centre stage at the very start of proceedings.

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Hexham Abbey traces its origins to around 674 AD, when St Wilfrid founded a monastery here. Its Anglo-Saxon crypt, built partly from Roman stone carried from Corbridge, is the only surviving part of that original church.

The festival's main choral event brings the Hexham Abbey Festival Chorus and Orchestra together for Joseph Haydn's The Creation, conducted by David Murray, on the evening of Saturday 28 September. Elsewhere the four days range widely: jazz from Jo Harrop and Paul Edis, cello from Riccardo Pes, the Latin sounds of Classico Latino, and a closing concert of early sacred music from The Marian Consort.

Tickets range from £5 for children and students up to £22, and are available through the Queen's Hall Arts Centre website and box office. Full details of the line-up were reported by the Hexham Courant.

For a building that has stood at the centre of Hexham life since the seventh century, an anniversary of this size deserves a proper celebration. Whether you come for Haydn, for jazz, or simply to hear 200 local children open the festival, this is a weekend that belongs to the whole town.

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