A concert in the historic Great Hall at Dartington on Sunday, July 3 at 7.30pm will highlight John Rutter’s charmingly whimsical version of Kenneth Grahame’s classic The Wind in the Willows.
There will be Bob Chilcott’s African cantata The Making of the Drum, which celebrates the traditional and intensely spiritual process of bringing a new drum into being.
Czech composer Antonín Tucapský’s haunting setting of Ted Hughes’s vivid vignettes of autumn, The Seven Sorrows, will contrast with C V Stanford’s rousing Songs of the Fleet (to poems by Henry Newbolt), and the concert will end with Antony Saunders’s extended choral fantasia on Gershwin’s jazz classic I Got Rhythm.
The Exeter Festival Chorus and its conductor Nigel Perrin — last heard performing Rachmaninov’s unaccompanied masterpiece, the All-night Vigil (or Vespers), in Exeter Cathedral and Bath Abbey — will be joined for this lighter evening of happy listening by Julian Rippon (baritone), Madeleine Mitchell (violin) and Peter Adcock (piano).