Report from Beverley Early Music Festival – Chapel and Tavern with Vivien Ellis and The Carnival Band

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30 May

As a fellow festival-goer agreed, we had not seen the attraction of the option of the venue of ‘the tavern’ (Beverley’s The Angel) first – and also that, if matters had ended with just the Chapel (though it had, again, been open to book just that venue’s part of the evening), it would have been a fairly sombre end to things, despite Charles Wesley’s fervent hopes.

For little that was sung was not setting Wesley’s texts, and he was not born until 1707 (and died when he was 80). So the first promised century or more of music from 1616 onwards – the year of Shakespeare’s death – was left to be represented by Thomas Butts’ reworking of Henry Purcell for ‘Love divine, all loves excelling’, and a traditional English tune for Bunyan’s ‘Who would true valour see’, which had apparently been collected by Vaughan Williams. (There was also a text early on of Isaac Watts, ‘Rejoice, ye shining worlds’. Settings of Wesley after his death accounted for extending the scope to the beginning of the Victorian era.)

The thinking may have been that Toll Gavel, as a United Reformed Church, suited this music better than music from the Anglican orthodoxy – and I have no notion whether former Methodist chapels were converted to use by that denomination, although it seems not unlikely.

In any case, though we had been urged to join in, if we knew the words, the hymn-books contained many of these Wesleyan ones, and there might have been greater participation, if this had been pointed out. I suspect that those books would have gone quite outside the chapel tradition, and therefore that the impression of music that we gained was not one that reflected the non-conformist tradition in which we were silently being asked to locate ourselves.

The performers arrived looking a little footweary (they had already done a tavern slot), but donned less brightly coloured garb, including a complete change for Vivien Ellis into a stretchy black number – and, when she re-emerged, the redness of her nose and mouth made me consider the possibility that she had had need to resort to a menthol remedy. (The others all had black jackets, with a stylish double-breasted top-jacket for Jub Davis (on double bass).) However, it may have worked – or I may have been mistaken – for there was no sign that her voice was lacking in power, and, when the men sang as well (in one case, with (I think) ‘Come all ye mourning pilgrims’, on their own), there were some agreeable harmonies.

When those of us watching did sing, as a quiet background to the performance, it added to the experience, but it was rather hard to be sure what that was : we knew that these were not concert-pieces, but also that this was not worship (and, as I have suggested, that this was a deliberate limitation to ‘chapel-type’ music), and, for me, that meant that I did not know where I felt myself to be. That said, there was an enthusiasm, even a fervour, that made this not simply performance.

Interspersed in the proceedings, Vivien Ellis nicely read a Thomas Hardy poem, ‘A Church Romance’, about how his parents allegedly met as the result of a glance exchanged in church, and Steve Banks ‘a sermon’ in the form of admonitions and exhortations of Wesley regarding sacred music, many of which parishioners would well heed : for example, not singingly too slowly, and trying to sing together.

I believe that we showed that his urging had had an effect on us as we joined in Bunyan’s hymn, and so closed ‘the first part’ – since it seemed a good idea, my companion pilgrim and I were out quickly and on foot to the tavern, not so much in the spirit of Till in heaven we take our place, as in the roofed-over beer-garden.


Getting there for a seat under the influence of a patio-heater was a distinct bonus (possible evidence that the troupe had been chilled earlier – along with the fact that, in this half, Vivien Ellis mainly kept a body-warmer on over her dress), as also was being able to join a short queue at the bar.

Here, the sound was amplified, and, in addition to the bag-pipes (played by Andy Watts), we were treated to rounds, some topical, and two from the seventeeth century. Here is my one of them that I liked best :

Beverley ale !
Where, where, where ?
In the blacksmith’s house.
I would I were there.


Also fun was :

A boat, a boat, haste to the ferry !
For we’ll go over to be merry
And laugh and sing and drink old sherry.


We also had a spirited rendition of O that I had but a fine man by Pelham Humfrey, in which Vivien Ellis took delight both in finding in the audience ‘a spicy one’, and showing how If I die, I die, in the true guise of an operatic diva.

Elsewhere, two more sensitive numbers in ‘An thou were my ain thing’ and, in ‘A blacksmith courted me’, one of her oft-performed ones.

We ended with two numbers from the volume Wit and Mirth or Pills to Purge Melancholy, a suitable title for this music, which, concentrating on ‘Old Simon the King’. All in all, a good and lively collection of tunes to round off the evening !


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