Dartington tries out ChoralFest

– and mulls over what comes next

After the demise of the long-established Dartington music summer school in its usual form, a new version of the festival took place last week. ChoralFest was organised by the Dartington Hall Trust (the charity running Dartington) as a “differently-formatted” version of an event it chose last year to discontinue, on the grounds of high costs and the charity’s own dire financial state.

The summer school has been a fixture at Dartington for more than 70 years, attracting world-class musicians performing in concerts and running courses. Summer schools in recent years have lasted four weeks, spanning a range of musical forms from medieval to contemporary, and including folk, jazz, composition and conducting skills. It led to many collaborations involving people from different musical genres. The final concert in 2023 was a performance of Bach’s B Minor Mass.

In contrast, the programme for the eight-day ChoralFest looked thin. The public concerts centred on five short evening recitals by professional singers best known for their operatic prowess. Most of them doubled up as tutors, giving singing lessons to the 70 or so people who had signed up for the week. They also rehearsed for a public performance of a Russian choral work given last Saturday.

In contrast to the usual summer school format, no instrumentalists took part, apart from two pianists. The near-absence of instrumentalists saved money but for most people detracted from the festival’s appeal. Each week of the summer schools in recent years has featured at least one big choral work with a choir of more than 100 and an orchestra.

On the ChoralFest opening night, taking centre stage was Mark Stone, a baritone best known for his roles in Wagner operas. Stone is also the trust’s creative director, installed last year after a recommendation from insolvency expert and opera fan David Buchler, recruited in 2023 as a key advisor to the trust. Stone sang Winterreise, an impassioned though intensely sad Schubert song cycle composed in 1827 when he was dying from syphilis.

The songs are shot through with death and despair. They were an odd choice for the start of a new festival. Stone’s voice seemed poorly suited to songs that Schubert wrote for a tenor, and which call for a less operatic performance than Stone provided.  He was accompanied on the piano by the impressive Kelvin Lim.

Two nights later Sarah Pring (mezzo soprano) and James Platt (bass) performed songs by the English composers Elgar and Vaughan Williams. Pring has a big and theatrical presence. Judging by the enthusiasm with which her performance was acclaimed many of her fans were in the audience.

Tenor Daniel Norman has an excellent reputation and could have been billed as ChoralFest’s star turn. His planned recital of a range of 20th century songs – also by English composers – promised much. On the evening of his performance, however, Norman was recovering from a throat infection. He completed just half the programme, leaving unsung what was to have been the highlight, a rendition of Vaughan Williams’ searing song sequence “On Wenlock Edge”.  Luckily Stone and the course director Gavin Carr had lined up what turned out an excellent substitute– an imaginatively animated film Norman had a hand in making in 2019, featuring him singing the piece to a soundtrack of piano and string quartet.

The final night’s concert was a performance of Rachmaninov’s Vespers (All Night Vigil), sung by the course participants supported by Pring and Norman, now recovered. Conducting the choir was Carr, a respected musician who is chorus master of London’s Philharmonia Chorus and directs two other choirs in Bath and Bournemouth. Whatever anyone thinks of Rachmaninov’s composition, it is a challenging piece for amateurs to sing, made harder by lack of orchestral accompaniment. The choir sang bravely enough. In a boost for the organisers the hall was sold out.

What of the future? The trust has said it wants to organise more music festivals. It has not ruled out returning to something with a closer resemblance to the summer school. It will presumably learn from this year, building on what works and scrapping things that don’t. One option would be for Stone and colleagues to beef up the offering for next year (assuming such an event is in the calendar for the centenary of Dartington in its post-Elmhirst form). Helped by a potentially bigger budget the trust could add at least another week plus orchestral players and – importantly – rethink the programme.

The trust could be more open about its costings. There continues to be a question mark about how expensive the old-model summer schools were to run. The trust has said the net costs of running a summer school – after income from participants and donations – have been more than £100,000 a year. The figure seems high. Some have argued the arithmetic uses unrealistically high numbers for the notional cost of using space at Dartington such as rehearsal rooms. Another argument is that the trust has failed to consider properly extra income derived from summer schools such as concert-goers spending on food and drink.

Whatever form of music festival they choose for the future, trust managers will need almost certainly to boost the number of participants. The 70 or so who took part – most of them with accommodation in the Dartington courtyard and nearby buildings – equate to about half the number of beds that the trust had said could be available in 2024 for a conventional summer school. Signalling that over the summer accommodation at Dartington has been far from full, the trust has for several weeks been offering 30 per cent off the price of its standard courtyard rooms for tourists and other visitors until the end of August.

One of the biggest challenges for the trust will be how to approach its relationship with the Dartington International Summer School Foundation, a separate charity closely aligned to the trust and with which it has previously worked on areas such as fund raising. The two bodies have in the past year fallen out. And while a full reconciliation seems unlikely some form of coming together would benefit both.

The foundation has for years provided vital financial support for the summer school. Its reserves last year totalled some £300,000, much of this derived from bequests and other donations. The foundation says that in 2023 it offered more money to keep the summer school going at Dartington. It says its overtures were rebuffed. That resulted in the foundation proceeding with its own two-week festival in Holt, Norfolk, based on the concept developed at Dartington and involving many of the same musicians and volunteers. The move sparked ire at the trust, on the grounds that the foundation was copying its intellectual property. Like ChoralFest, the Holt event has just finished. The foundation has plans for at least two more annual summer schools, both in Norfolk. Its programme for 2025 is expected soon.

But however cool the relationship is now, both the trust and the foundation could gain from a closer connection. Access to the foundation’s funds could be useful for the trust. For the foundation, continuing to host a big festival away from Devon, but with a continuing frosty relationship with the trust, could pose problems. If the Dartington connection is expunged for ever, potential benefactors could be put off. Some sort of agreement – akin to a form of treaty – could be in order. As the trust works out whether to repeat ChoralFest or to build something better, an effort to re-establish an association with the foundation is one of the many ideas it should examine.