The Wooburn Festival is back for its 59th year, running through most of September and October across the Chilterns and Thames Valley — including High Wycombe.
Richard Hickox CBE — the conductor who founded the City of London Sinfonia — set it up 59 years ago, and it's been run ever since by the Wooburn Festival Society, a registered charity chaired by Brian Johnson.
The idea hasn't changed: bring nationally and internationally known musicians, artists and speakers to the area at prices anyone can afford, backed by sponsors, volunteers and a lot of Gift Aid envelopes.
The full programme runs to dozens of concerts, talks and screenings across Wooburn Green, Bourne End, Beaconsfield, Dorney and High Wycombe itself.
Here are 10 worth your diary...
High Wycombe Lunchtime Concerts
📍All Saints Church
📆 Every Monday until 12th October
⏰ 1.10-2pm
🎟️ Free
The one strand actually happening in High Wycombe town. The Mustard Seed Café opens at 11am for coffee and cake before each concert, and the music itself runs under an hour, so it's built around a lunch break rather than an evening out. Fumi Otsuki, a Royal Academy-trained violinist who performs regularly in British cathedrals, opens on 21st September alongside German pianist and soprano Gisela Meyer. Lorenzo Masotto follows on 28th September — an Italian composer who lives at the foot of the Carega massif in the Dolomites and moved through prog rock and punk before settling on the contemporary classical style he plays now. Hong Kong-born pianist Lance Mok, who writes music exploring migration and Buddhist philosophy, plays on 5th October, and soprano Adrienne Walters closes the run on 12th October with her regular pianist Gergely Kaposi, mixing well-known arias with less familiar ones.
If you’d like to explore the town before or after a concert, our guide to High Wycombe’s historic town-centre sights has six places to look out for.
Jazz Supper: Jacqui Dankworth – The Sondheim Songbook
📍The Curzon Centre, Beaconsfield
📆 Saturday 26th September
⏰ 7.30pm
🎟️ £40
Dankworth has sung in the British and West End premieres of several Sondheim shows, so this isn't a covers set — it's someone who's lived inside the songs. She's joined by her husband Charlie Wood on piano, Oli Hayhurst on bass and Tom Hooper on drums for an evening working through West Side Story, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and Into the Woods, served alongside a two-course supper.
Guided Tour of Dorney Court
📍Dorney Court
📆 Tues 29th September or Weds 14th October
⏰ 10.30am-12.30pm
🎟️ £25
A two-hour look round a Grade I-listed Tudor manor the Palmer family has held for close to 500 years, largely unaltered inside. A guide takes you through the house and the church next door, pointing out the art and furniture along the way, and you're free to wander the gardens once the formal bit's done. Tea, coffee and a homemade flapjack are included on arrival.
Wooburn Singers: Come and Sing Day
📍The Beaconsfield School
📆 Saturday 3rd October
⏰ 9.45am-6pm
🎟️ £20, £5 students
A full day spent learning Duruflé's Requiem — a 20th-century choral piece that leans on Gregorian chant and softer, more impressionistic harmonies than the fire-and-brimstone requiems that came before it — under conductor Jonathon Cole-Swinard, ending in an informal performance. You don't need choir experience to turn up, just a willingness to sing for a day; the score's included in the ticket, and a ploughman's lunch is available to add on.
Barefoot Opera: Così fan tutte
📍Bourne End Community Centre
📆 Saturday 3rd October
⏰ 7.30pm
🎟️ £25, £12.50 students
Mozart's comedy about two soldiers testing their fiancées' loyalty by wooing each other's partners in disguise — as daft as it sounds and sharper than it looks. Barefoot Opera, founded by director Jenny Miller, stages it with as much movement and physical comedy as singing, which is generally what makes their productions land with people who wouldn't normally sit through opera.
Kanekt: Where Indian Music Meets Global Fusion
📍St Paul's Parish Church, Wooburn Green
📆 Monday 5th October
⏰ 8-10pm
🎟️ £18, £9 students
Sitar player Ricky Romain leads a band that also features clarinet, violin, guitar, bass and percussion, working North Indian classical ragas up against jazz and Celtic influences over 10 pieces and an interval. Some of the set is meditative sitar-and-violin dialogue, some of it's a reworking of jazz standards through an Indian classical lens — not an easy thing to pull off, but that's the point of the night.
Film Night: The Night of the Hunter
📍National Film & Television School Studios
📆 Sunday 11th October
⏰ 8-10pm
🎟️ £10
Charles Laughton's only film as director, from 1955: Robert Mitchum as a preacher with LOVE and HATE tattooed across his knuckles, chasing two children across the American South. Black and white, 92 minutes, 12A — and it's showing at the National Film & Television School's own studios rather than a normal cinema, which is a nice touch for a film this widely studied by people who make films for a living.
Heath String Quartet
📍St Paul's Parish Church, Wooburn Green
📆 Friday 9th October
⏰ 8pm
🎟️ £25, £12.50 students
A programme that jumps three centuries in an evening: Lyadov's Sarabande and Fugue from Les Vendredis, Matthew Locke's Suite III and his incidental music for The Tempest, Mozart's first string quartet (written when he was 14), and Mendelssohn's Op. 44 No. 3. The quartet tours internationally and has built its name on exactly this kind of range.
Ryan Wang
📍St Paul's Parish Church, Wooburn Green
📆 Friday 16th October
⏰ 8pm
🎟️ £25, £12.50 students
Wang won BBC Young Musician 2024, and this programme — Mozart's Nine Variations on a Minuet, a set of Schubert Impromptus, and Chopin's Sonata No. 3 in B minor — is a serious one for a player still this early in his career.
Agatha Christie: 50 Years On
📍Bourne End Library
📆 Saturday 17th October
⏰ 2.30pm
🎟️ £8
Christie biographer Dr Mark Aldridge marks fifty years since her death — and a hundred since The Murder of Roger Ackroyd — with a talk called "Ten Things To Know About Agatha Christie." Aldridge has written three books on her work, so expect more than the usual Poirot trivia.
Full listings and booking, including everything happening out in Wooburn Green, Bourne End and Beaconsfield, are at wooburn.com.
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