I’m off to Tampere next week. Tampereen Savel, the International Vocal Festival, was a highlight of my year for decades, and I’m delighted to be asked back to celebrate the festival’s 50th anniversary. I’ll be joining chairman Jussi Chydenius, together with Kim Nazarian from the USA, Finland’s  Susanna Lukkarinen  and Morten Vinther Sørensen from Denmark on the ensemble contest jury. 

I’ve had some wonderful visits to Tampere as both performer and jury chairman. Performing highlights include an early performance of Arvo Pärt’s Passio with the Hilliard Ensemble, Ivan Moody’s Passion and Resurrection and Ambrose Field’s Being Dufay as well as Red Byrd doing our thing.  And there have been magnificent performances by the various ensembles at the Gala concert; one year I got so carried away I forgot to present the trophy…

This year the festival will climax with a Grand Anniversary Sing, devised by this year’s artistic director Merzi Rajala. The plan is for each of the returning artistic directors to lead a song in which anyone can take part. I rashly volunteered to lead a performance of Bob Chilcott’s arrangement of Billy Joel’s ‘And so it goes’, which so many ensembles used to sing during the first decade of the century. Rashly…because, of course, Bob wrote it for the King’s Singers and probably didn’t envisage a choir of a thousand voices who’d never met before. Wish me luck!

In other news, my sixth and last book (it’s always the last one) has gone off to the publishers, so I’ve finally ended my eighteen month long Christmas Eve. Expect gardening blogs over the summer while I wind down. In the meantime, Miranda has just published a conversation I had with Giuseppe Pantano about all things Dowland. There will be more actual Dowland to come, once the David Gorton/Stefan Östersjö recording reaches a final edit (see Dowland in Sweden).