In this anniversary gala concert, we revisit some of the themes of concerts from earlier festivals, many of which reflected Peter Holman’s interests in English Baroque music. The first half of the programme consists of a complete concert performance of John Blow’s miniature masque-like opera Venus & Adonis, performed at the 2002 Festival. Written for Charles II’s court, it tells the story of the hunter Adonis, who reluctantly leaves his lover Venus and her son Cupid to hunt a wild boar. He is fatally gored by the beast, leaving Venus and the chorus to mourn him in a moving lament. Blow’s music is charming, energetic and powerful by turns, and the opera was clearly the model for Dido & Aeneas, composed a few years later by Henry Purcell, Blow’s friend, colleague and former pupil.

There will also be some light-hearted items, including the famous scene in Purcell’s Fairy Queen (1692) featuring a drunk, stuttering poet and Charles Dibdin’s amusing operatic street scene The Brickdust Man (1770), portraying a lover’s tiff between a street trader and a milkmaid. Members of the Festival committee will once again display their musical prowess in Leopold Mozart’s Cassation in G, once known as Haydn’s Toy Symphony. A more serious note is struck by a fine concerto grosso by John Stanley, marking the tercentenary of the composer’s birth, an Italian duet by Handel mostly containing music familiar from Messiah; and a celebratory duet and chorus from Thomas Arne’s masque The Fairy Prince (1771).