2026 Deal Festival wrap and Virtuous and Vicious in NYC

A Summer on Two Coasts: Deal Festival 2026 and a New York Premiere

This July has been one of those rare stretches where two strands of my musical life came to fruition at once — on the Kent coast, where Deal Music and Arts Festival 2026 has just drawn to a close, and across the Atlantic, where my dance work Virtuous & Vicious received its New York premiere with Pilobolus at The Joyce Theater.

Deal Festival 2026

This year's festival was, by any measure, my most successful yet of the 4 festivals I’ve done for Deal: our highest number of sold-out events in the festival's history, record ticket sales, and box office income exceeding our target by 20%. But what I'll remember most is the programme behind those numbers.

It was the third year of our Artist in Association programme in partnership with the Royal Academy of Music, which brings a young musician to Deal to curate their own events, work within our Learning & Participation programme, and respond to the town, its history and its communities. This year the brilliant pianist Xiaowen Shang devised a theatre and music show around Dickens' women, gave a lunchtime recital tracing the legacy of Harriet Cohen, and worked with our young musicians throughout the year. And in 2026 we established a legacy strand to this work: last year's artist, cellist Hoda Jahanpour, returned with her ensemble Nomad and Senegalese percussionist Dudù Kouate for a sold-out concert. Watching this programme deepen year on year — young artist leaving a mark, then returning as they progress their careers — has become one of the great satisfactions of my role as Artistic Director.

New music was showcased in every concert, and diversity championed across the whole programme. Our two Composers in Focus — Nneka Cummins and Michael Berkeley, at very different stages of their creative lives — threaded through four concerts and joined me for pre-concert conversations. Multi-arts programming flourished, from sound art on Deal beach to acrobatics, poetry and theatre. And our breakthrough political talks series, hosted by Gavin Esler, brought Neil Kinnock, Penny Mordaunt and Jeremy Hunt to the Astor Theatre for three afternoons of packed, probing conversation.

Ripples of Como at the festival

Amid all this it was a particular pleasure to have my own music in the festival. On the Monday evening, the Sacconi Quartet were joined by clarinettist Timothy Orpen — for whom the piece was written — to perform my clarinet quintet Ripples of Como at St George's Church, in a programme that placed it alongside Haydn's "Bird" Quartet, Purcell's Chacony and Mozart's Clarinet Quintet. To hear the work in that lineage, played by musicians of this calibre in a full church a few minutes from the sea, was a highlight of my festival.

Photo Michel Faber

Virtuous & Vicious in New York

Meanwhile, Virtuous & Vicious, my collaboration with the legendary American dance company Pilobolus, reached New York. The work has been touring the USA since March 2026, and its NYC premiere came as part of the company's summer residency at The Joyce Theater (23 June–12 July). I travelled to New York for rehearsals — the first time I had seen the completed work since the tour began — and it was a thrill to experience how the piece has grown in the dancers' bodies. The Arts Fuse described the score as "driven by deep bass lines and throbbing rhythms, propelling choreography that shifts between ethereal beauty and sly humour” Theater Pizzazz "The electronic score suddenly, parenthetically quivers as do puppeted performers." — exactly the territory Pilobolus and I set out to explore together.

What's next

The wrap of the Deal Festival is only just done, but my desk is already turning to the next big project: SITCOM, my neo-baroque comic chamber opera with librettist Alan McKendrick, which receives its world premiere with Opera Philadelphia in May 2027. More on that soon.