THE Exon Singers? annual Tavistock-based festival has once again given enormous pleasure, the choir displaying the precision and musicality the audience have come to expect.
The festival started with evensong at the parish church on Sunday, and the church was again the setting for a sequence of music and reading on Monday followed by candlelit compline, and for the organ recital by Christopher Stoke on Tuesday.
This year for the second time choral evening prayer at Buckfast Abbey on Wednesday was broadcast live, It featured music by composer-in-residence Gabriel Jackson, including the first performance of his Ave Maria.
The secular concert at the Wharf on Thursday included the customary madrigals and the delightful Songs of Courtship ? translations of ancient Chinese poems set to music by John Bevan-Baker. But the choir broke from tradition by replacing the Songs of Yale with lively settings of ?Blue Moon?, ?Over the Rainbow? and ?I?ve Got Rhythm?.
After the interval another innovation ? the audience was kept laughing with Horovitz?s ?Horrortorio?, a musical account of the wedding of Dracula?s daughter to Frankenstein?s son. At the piano was Jeffrey Makinson.
The choir moved to Exeter on Friday for the 16th century Victoria Vespers. On Saturday there was a lecture ?Music and spirituality? by Bishop Martin Shaw, with the final concert ?A Feast of Cathedral Music? in the evening, both at St Eustachius.
The festival ended with parish eucharist on Sunday
JACQUI FOGWILL