Ryedale Festival is part of a proud tradition of classical festivals across the UK that thrive in local communities - Christopher Glynn
Not all festivals involve tents and mud. Across the UK, classical music festivals offer a different kind of experience, rooted in place and shaped by community. Summer in Britain is a feast of festivals. You can head to the mud of Glastonbury, the packed fields of Reading, or the curated cool of Latitude.
Or you could choose something different — no less powerful, but perhaps more surprising — and find your summer soundtrack at one of the UK’s many regional classical music festivals.
I’m lucky enough to direct one: the Ryedale Festival, a gathering that each year welcomes over 12,000 ticket holders to around 70 events across North Yorkshire. It’s part of a proud tradition of classical festivals across the UK that thrive not in metropolitan hubs, but in local communities, shaped by their surroundings and sustained by passion and purpose. And Yorkshire has some of the best examples you’ll find anywhere.
I believe these festivals matter more than ever. Not as some quaint leftover from a pre-digital age, but as proof of how classical music can thrive when it’s not just something to listen to, but something to be part of.
The relationship between music and place has always fascinated me. A concert isn’t just about what you hear — it’s about where you are, who you’re with, the history humming in the walls. At Ryedale, we bring international artists to evocative Yorkshire spaces – from castles and abbeys to great houses and moorland outposts - where audiences feel a sense of atmosphere before a note is played.
Performers feel it too. At one concert in Pickering’s medieval church - beneath centuries-old wall-paintings and with the audience barely a breath away - a performer told me they felt more alive than they had playing Carnegie Hall the week before. It’s not a competition, but it is a reminder: intimacy transforms experience.
The sense of connection ripples through the audience too. You chat in the queue, recognise familiar faces at different events, and often end up talking with the artists themselves. Trust builds. Curiosity has room to grow. And suddenly, there’s room to programme something unexpected, because the context is one of shared discovery.
That openness matters, because classical music today lives in paradox. On one hand, it’s never been easier to access. Every sonata, every symphony - on demand, in our pockets. But in schools and our wider culture, its presence has been shrinking, leaving many without the invitation or encouragement to make it their own. The pipeline is being quietly dismantled.
Festivals can’t fix this alone, but they can be part of the pushback. They can offer a space where excellence and accessibility go hand in hand and where audiences find both a way in and a reason to stay. A chance to step away from digital overload and connect with a living tradition.
I’ve seen it time and again in Ryedale: the hesitant newcomer who returns as a regular, the child wide-eyed at their first concert. These moments of connection are what festivals like ours do best. And in our fractured attention economy, such wholehearted listening becomes its own quiet revolution.
Yet there’s a lingering sense that serious culture happens in cities and regional festivals are simply peripheral offshoots: charming but not exactly cutting-edge. I’d challenge that.
Festivals like ours are commissioning new work, launching careers, winning new audiences and giving artists space to experiment. At their best, they embody the idea that culture belongs to everyone.
No one ever put it better than Benjamin Britten, as he founded a festival in a Suffolk fishing town and invited the world to come to him. “I believe in roots, in associations, in backgrounds, in personal relationships,” he said – and the lesson endures: with imagination and commitment, classical music can thrive anywhere. And when it does, it doesn’t just enrich the place it inhabits; it uplifts the wider society it reflects.
For those who prefer proof on a spreadsheet, a recent independent study found that for every pound spent on Ryedale Festival tickets, £3 was generated for the regional economy. That kind of multiplier plays out across the country, wherever festivals become part of local life.
The hotels are full, the pub orders more wine, the taxi company takes on extra drivers. Culture may often need modest subsidy to succeed, but in the end it really does pay for itself – and then some.
That’s why I believe festivals like Ryedale matter. They are places of encounter - between performer and listener, tradition and experiment, the local and the international. Where civic pride meets artistic adventure. Seek one out this summer. And if we’ve done our job, you’ll leave feeling more connected: to place, to music and to something larger than both.
Christopher Glynn is artistic director of the Ryedale Festival, which takes place between July 11-27.