The
Vale of Glamorgan Festival is a contemporary music festival based in and around the county of
Vale of GlamorganThe Vale of Glamorgan is a county borough in Wales; an exceptionally rich agricultural area, it lies in the southern part of Glamorgan, South Wales...
,
WalesWales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
and held annually during September. The festival was founded in 1969 by Welsh composer
John MetcalfJohn Metcalf is a British and Canadian composer. He has worked in many forms, including large-scale operas, choral and orchestral works, and a great deal of chamber music, both instrumental and vocal...
, who is the Artistic Director to this day.
After initially being a generic classical music festival, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival re-defined its artistic vision in 1992 to become a "festival of living composers". Since then it has gained a reputation as one of the most adventurous and unique in Great Britain. In recognition of this position, the Vale of Glamorgan Festival received the Prudential Award in 1994. The Festival’s Artistic Director received one of four inaugural Creative Wales Ambassador Awards from the Arts Council of Wales in 2009
http://www.artswales.org.uk/viewnews.asp?id=1201. The awards recognise artists’ achievements, their standing in the arts in Wales and their capacity to push the boundaries of their art as form and as a point of contact with contemporary Wales.
Recent highlights include festivals devoted to the music of the
Baltic StatesThe term Baltic states refers to the Baltic territories which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I: primarily the contiguous trio of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania ; Finland also fell within the scope of the term after initially gaining independence in the 1920s.The...
(1996),
AustriaAustria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...
(1998) and
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
(2001). The 2002 festival featured a widely acclaimed tour to Britain by the Finnish Radio Chamber Choir. 2005 brought a mix of music, visual art, storytelling and food, in a festival with interwoven themes of Japan and the work of women composers. The 2006 edition highlighted the music of
Steve ReichStephen Michael "Steve" Reich is an American composer who together with La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass is a pioneering composer of minimal music...
,
Arvo PärtArvo Pärt is an Estonian classical composer and one of the most prominent living composers of sacred music. Since the late 1970s, Pärt has worked in a minimalist style that employs his self-made compositional technique, tintinnabuli. His music also finds its inspiration and influence from...
,
Georges LentzGeorges Lentz is a contemporary composer and sound artist, born in Luxembourg in 1965, and is that country's internationally best known composer. Since 1990, he has been living in Sydney, Australia...
and
Pēteris VasksPēteris Vasks is a Latvian composer.Vasks was born in Aizpute, Latvia, into the family of a Baptist pastor. He trained as a violinist at the Jazeps Vitols Latvian Academy of Music, as a double-bass player with Vitautas Sereikaan at the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and played in several...
.