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Few places feel more fitting for music rooted in landscape than the shores of Derwentwater.
And when guitarist and composer Richard Durrant heads to Theatre by the Lake in Keswick this spring, he’ll be bringing with him not just a remarkable instrument, but a lifetime spent drawing inspiration from the natural world.
Durrant’s latest tour, The Art of Levitation, celebrates 40 years since he first emerged from the Royal College of Music and made his London debut. But it also reflects something much more personal - a deepening connection between music, place and the environments we inhabit.
At the centre of his tour is the new piece that shares its title. Released earlier this year, The Art of Levitation is a slow-burning, hypnotic work performed on a guitar made from 5,000-year-old English bog oak - wood that began its life thousands of years before the first notes of Western classical music were ever written.
The sound of the piece reflects that sense of deep time. Using the DADGAD tuning often associated with British and Celtic folk traditions, Durrant is creating music that feels spacious and elemental - as if it has grown from the landscape itself.
That relationship with place runs through much of his work.
In recent years Durrant has travelled thousands of miles between concerts by bicycle, sometimes arriving at venues with the bike and trailer that have carried both his luggage and guitar across the British Isles. The journeys are partly practical and partly symbolic - a quiet protest against the environmental impact of touring, and a way of reconnecting music with the landscapes it moves through.
It’s a philosophy that feels particularly at home in the Lake District, where landscape has long shaped artistic imagination - from Wordsworth’s poetry to contemporary environmental art.
Durrant’s own musical path has always been unconventional. Raised in Brighton in a working-class family, he struggled at school with undiagnosed autism and ADHD. Yet alongside those challenges came a fierce musical focus: by his teens he had passed Grade 8 in guitar, cello and theory and was already performing publicly.
Over the decades since, he has built a career that sits somewhere between classical virtuosity and folk storytelling. His concerts weave together music by Bach, Scarlatti and Purcell with the influence of British folk guitarists such as John Renbourn and Bert Jansch - alongside his own quietly meditative compositions.
The result is an evening that feels less like a formal recital and more like a musical journey through centuries of sound and story.
And in Keswick, surrounded by fells, water and sky, that journey may feel especially resonant.
Richard Durrant performs The Art of Levitation at Theatre by the Lake, Keswick, on Thursday 30 April at 7.30pm.
Tour dates so far include:
April 25 – Ropetackle Arts Centre
30 – Theatre by the Lake
May 1 – All Saints Church, West Woodburn, Northumbria
5- Wolfson College Cambridge (private recital)
6 – St John’s, Broadstone, Dorset
7 – The Flavel
8 – The Acorn
14 – Left Bank Leeds
16 – Upwood Village Hall, Cambridgeshire
June 4 – Roses Theatre
13 – Criccieth Festival
20 – Wilmington Church, Sussex
21 – Brighton (Midsummer Special t.b.a)
July 18 – Trinity Theatre
24 – Ropetackle Arts Centre, Shoreham-by-Sea
August 29th – Alnwick Playhouse
September 19 – Stamford Arts Centre
22 – Hercules Hall, Portmeirion
24 – The Courtyard Hereford
October2 – Broughty Ferry, Scotland
