Some friends regularly go to events at the Edington Festival nearby, but I’ve never managed it. This is because it usually clashes with the Cathedral Chamber Choir’s cathedral week and I’m away or not feeling like going to another service. (This year my husband is overseas so I’m needed for childcare).
I enjoy listening to the Festival’s BBC broadcasts though. At the same time, something about the Festival saddens me. It comes over with the impression of ‘bringing music within the liturgy to the West Country where they don’t have it’. It is true that outside the cathedral and abbey foundations round here there are limited opportunities for performing high-quality music during services, especially for adult female singers. But this isn’t necessarily for want of singers.
I think for example of a church near where I live (I have not referred to this church in this blog before) which used to have a ‘special choir’ which met to perform Mass settings and motets occasionally at services. I never had the chance to sing in this choir, because shortly before I moved here there was a change of clergy and the special choir was abolished. I don’t know what goes on musically at that church now.
I suspect that if you gathered the right people together, there would be nothing in the repertoire of the Edington Festival’s choirs that they could not perform, although they might not be able to do it all intensively over one week.