The Harrogate Competitive Festival for Music, Speech & Drama
The Harrogate Competitive Festival For Music Speech and Drama (not to be confused with the Harrogate International Festival) will celebrate its 90th year in October 2026.
Last year's winners; Thomas Heath, percussionist and 2025 Young Musician of the Festival and Evy Reed, actor and 2025 Speech and Drama Champion.
Since its auspicious beginning in 1936 the Festival has welcomed over 100,000 performers of all ages to take to the stage and have their first experience of appearing in front of a live audience. For many, this takes a huge amount of courage, but the rewards are extensive. In addition to Harrogate and other parts of Yorkshire, entrants have come from as far away as Derby, London, Hull, Newcastle and Teeside.
The Festival is organised and run entirely by volunteers. In the past, our running costs have been met mainly by entrance fees, which we are committed to keeping low to ensure the Festival can be accessible to all, but sadly in the last few years competitor numbers have fallen due to the after-effects of the Covid epidemic and school cuts in performing arts budgets. Barak Obama once said, “If you try to suppress the arts, then you’re suppressing the deepest dreams and aspirations of a people”. We couldn’t agree more but this does make the task more difficult.
Our aim is to provide the young people of Harrogate and North Yorkshire with as broad an education in music, speech and drama as possible. It is very likely that you will have had family or friends or know of colleagues and employees’ children who have taken part in the Festival at some point. It really is a community feat.
In our briefing last year, we appealed for help with funding and we are doing so again. In 2025 each individual performer’s share of the overall cost of mounting the Festival was £20.24, a whopping 20% increase on 2024. We expect this upward trend to continue and we are hoping that our local businesses will be able to help the Festival to carry on providing the opportunities for young people to follow their dreams and aspirations by donating. This is straightforward through the website (https://www.hcfmsd.co.uk/Finances.html). This year we will have 795 separate performances involving 1,600 individuals in 33 class sessions over the three weekends.
If you need any further information please contact me and we hope we might have the pleasure of meeting you in March this year. The programme runs 6th-8th, 13th-15th and 20th-22nd.
Thanks very much.
Paul Dutton - Chairman
chairman@hcfmsd.co.uk
Registered Charity Number 510706
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