All Posts Tagged With: "Ludlow Festival"

Frost in June in Ludlow

June 25th, 2009 • Peter • 1 comment • Related • Filed Under

Sir David Frost is and has been many things, but he is not Art, Music or Drama, which are loosely assumed to be the key criteria for inclusion in Ludlow’s annual festival, and there seemed no obvious reason for his appearing here. But this festival has become something of a cultural potpourri, and it’s hard to find a coherent theme in the choices made by the organisers. I’ve said this before, but of course, in some ways this doesn’t matter at all. They booked Frost for “An Audience with Sir David Frost (Followed by a Q&A session)” at Ludlow’s Assembly Rooms and I went along quite uncertain of what to expect.

To start with it turned out to be a truly enjoyable nostalgia trawl through ‘60s television satire, of which David Frost was the principle pioneer. Showing some evocative clips from That Was The Week That Was, and the Frost Report, he was obviously relishing his role in bringing so much great and subsequently famous talent to the screen for the first time – like Roy Kinnear, Willie Rushton, John Cleese, Ronnies Corbett and Barker.

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Lute, Theorbo and the Song of the Lark in Comus Country…..

June 24th, 2009 • Peter • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

Last weekend Ludlow festival kicked off its 50th anniversary in the profound hope that the rain Gods would lay off. The key element of the festival has always been a fortnight of performances of a Shakespeare play – this year, Romeo & Juliet­ – held in the magnificent arena of Ludlow Castle’s inner bailey. On a warm summer’s evening, as the swifts swoop across a pinkened sky, there can be few more lovely settings.

In the cold rain, it is a species of purgatory.

Alongside the play, other shows, concerts and talks have been put on in an attempt to develop the fortnight into a full-blown arts festival, although somehow this has never really evolved into the recognisably cohesive, focused occasion it could be. Nevertheless, some of the individual events are imaginatively conceived, as was a concert performed by English Ayres on Sunday night in the magnificent, west-facing dining-room of Oakly Park House, three miles north of Ludlow. The Georgian mansion, home of Lord and Lady Windsor, was reordered extensively in the 1820s for Lord Windsor’s ancestor, the Hon Robert Clive by C R Cockerell and is one of his and Shropshire’s finest. Before the concert we stood on the lawn in front of the house, looking  across paddocks and parkland liberally strewn with the venerable oaks that gave the park its name, while we drank a few glasses of champagne.

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