Hay Festival Winter Weekend 2024

Singing is good for our mental health and this half-hour open air performance between events will make you feel like you’re part of a whole. Come along and have a listen as Hay Community Choir share their joy in music.

Enjoy a half-hour open air performance between events. A crew of local landlubbers singing rollicking, traditional sea shanties in a cappella three-part harmony, as well as other songs on a nautical theme. Enjoyment is guaranteed or else you’ll walk the plank!

Hay Shantymen have been together for over seven years, raising more than £10,000 for the RNLI. They’ve performed widely, including Latitude and Falmouth International Shanty Festival. In 2023 they wrote a shanty of their own (‘Seaweed Revolution’), performed at the Natural History Museum in London.

Beware an encounter with the Turon and Mari Lwyd beasts as you enter St Mary’s Churchyard for a night of tales of folklore and mysterious creatures. Keep your wits about you as you hear stories of English mummers plays and Austrian Krampus runs, to modern pagan rituals at Stonehenge and the night in Finland when a young girl is crowned with candles as St Lucy – a martyred Christian girl who also appears as a witch leading a procession of the dead.

Folk musician John Kirkpatrick will sing to the spirits in the churchyard as you arrive and lead you into the candlelit church where author Sarah Clegg awaits to take you on a journey through midwinter to explore the lesser-known Christmas traditions.

Ghastly and ghostly, Clegg looks at the origins of midwinter mythologies, and with accompaniment from Kirkpatrick and Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk brings to life an unsettling tale or two. After all, a little darkness never hurt anyone, did it?

Cellist Maxim Calver first gained public recognition as a BBC Young Musician 2018 Grand Finalist and Strings Category winner, where he made his concerto debut with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. Since the competition he has been in high demand as a soloist across the UK and Europe.

Hear him play a programme that includes Bach’s much-loved Cello Suite No.1 in G major, Gaspar Cassadó’s 1926 Suite for solo cello, which combines traditional Spanish dance rhythms with elegant, fluid melodic passages reminiscent of French style, and a rare performance of George Crumb’s Sonata for Solo Cello from 1955.