LAKE District Summer Music has announced the line up for its fortnight-long festival.

Celebrating its 33rd year, LDSM returns next month with 40 events at 11 venues spread across the region, stretching from Ulverston and Kirkby Lonsdale to Ambleside via Kendal, Windermere, Bowness and Hawkshead.

With its heart in chamber music, there is something to suit all music lovers in the 2017 festival: orchestral, choral, solo recitals, opera on film, masterclasses, early music, world music, popular favourites and new works, jazz and much more.

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Running from Saturday, July 29 until Friday, August 11, the festival features a tidy amount of works by Schubert, including baritone Benjamin Appl singing Winterreise; rarely-heard early quartets; and the Octet played by new to LDSM, the Berkeley Ensemble.

Add to that a golden thread of Haydn that runs through the tuneful two weeks, with string quartets, piano trios and solo piano, and you have all the promise and ingredients of being LDSM's best ever musical gathering.

Under the revered artistic direction of distinguished founder Renna Kellaway, LDSM 2017 opens in majestic style with the ten sopranos, altos, tenors, basses and 20-piece orchestra of Solomon's Knot performing JS Bach's choral masterpiece Mass in B Minor at Ulverston's Coronation Hall.

The tone switches dramatic the following night (Sunday, July 30, 8pm) for the LDSM Ella Fitzgerald Tribute Concert at Zeffirellis, Ambleside, starring the vocals of Emma Smith alongside the Jamie Safiruddin Trio.

And included in the Monday, July 31, programme will be the first appearance during this year's festival by both the Villiers Quartet and remarkable baritone Benjamin Appl, performing together at Kendal's St Thomas's Church (8pm).

Benjamin returns to the Kendal church the night after (Tuesday, August 1, 7.30pm) with pianist Simon Lepper for Schubert's Winterreise.

Among LDSM's new Festival Debut strand will be Finnish cellist Kalle-Pekka Koponen (with pianist Andrew Dunlop) playing Ambleside Parish Centre on Wednesday, August 2 (11am); the Aurelian Piano Trio, of New Zealand, performing works by Beethoven, Shostakovich and Ravel at Kirkby Lonsdale Parish Church on Thursday, August 3 at noon; the Consone Quartet at Windermere's Carver Church on Friday, August 4 (11am); Australian violinist Emily Sun (with pianist Jennifer Hughes) at Ambleside Parish Centre on Monday, August 7 (11am), and Romanian pianist, Alexandra Vaduva, at Ambleside Parish Church on Friday, August 11 (11am).

As well as plenty of new faces, LDSM welcomes back several firm favourites.

Illustrious artists-in-residence returning include the Chilingirian Quartet, cellist Robert Cohen, pianist Carole Presland and the Gould Piano Trio, which brings a new work by Mark Simpson.

The centenary of the Russian Revolution is marked by music by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich and Stravinsky and LDSM's ongoing First World War commemorations highlight music by Debussy, Ravel, Elgar, Bridge, Bartók, Rebecca Clarke and rarities by Delius, Gurney, Röntgen, McEwen, Ibert and Enescu.

At noon on Saturday, August 5, Kendal Town Hall hosts an innovative family event mixing puppetry and music by the Palisander Recorder Quartet, and in the month that marks the 70th anniversary of India’s independence from the UK, there's a recital for sitar, tabla and tanpura, courtesy of Punita Gupta, Hevylen Seenan and Shambhu Gupta at Blackwell Arts and Crafts House, Bowness on Monday, July 31 (5pm).

Going back even earlier, LDSM marks the 450th anniversary of Monteverdi's birth with a selection of his madrigals - together with part songs by Holst and Finzi - performed by local singers the Herdwyk Consort on Wednesday, August 9 at St Thomas's Church (9.45pm).

To book telephone 01539-742621; online at www.ldsm.org.uk, or from the festival office at Kendal's Stricklandgate House, 92 Stricklandgate.