Brighton Early Music Festival (BREMF) has opened its priority booking window, giving members of its Festival Friends scheme first access to tickets for the 2026 programme, themed Bringers of Dreams. General booking opens on Monday, 3 August.
Running from 2 - 25 October, with pre-festival events starting 19 September, BREMF has long established itself as one of the world's premier festivals dedicated to early music, and this year's programme shows exactly why: a wide-ranging season spanning centuries of repertoire and a real diversity of atmosphere and setting.
Concert highlights include City of Dreams, a Florentine "extravaganza" narrated by Maria de' Medici exploring Renaissance Florence's cultural flowering; The Planets, a celestial orchestral reimagining of Holst's masterpiece by ensemble Spiritato; and The Fairy Queen, Purcell's midsummer-night setting performed by the London Handel Players alongside BREMF's own Emerging Artists.
For something more intimate, Dowland Day brings three very different late-night concerts exploring melancholy, insomnia and faith through solo lute song and viol consort. Elsewhere, Polia's Power offers a female-perspective staging of a 15th-century novel with video projection, while In Terra Aliena is a meditation on belonging and hope.
Venues and formats vary just as widely; from grand orchestral evenings to a relaxed "Clubnight" showcasing emerging talent in a pub setting, and an open mic night for informal jamming.
The festival also keeps a strong community and family thread running throughout: a free Polyphony Crawl through Brighton's churches, a baby-and-toddler concert from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, family singing and lullaby workshops, and a walking event linking nature and song. Underpinning it all is the Festival Friends scheme, as well as BREMF's outreach programme taking live music into local schools and care settings.
BREMF has been a fixture on Brighton's cultural calendar for many years now, and Scene has been lucky enough to visit many of its venues over that time, catching some genuinely fantastic performances along the way. If you've never been to a BREMF event before, this autumn is a great excuse to change that; few festivals anywhere offer early music of this quality and range.
Anyone keen to get ahead of the queue has just over a week left of Friends-only booking before tickets open to the wider public on 3 August.
Full programme and ticket booking details on the BREMF website.
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