Last weekend Ludlow festival kicked off its 50^th anniversary in the profound hope that the rain Gods would lay off. The key element of the festival has always been a fortnight of performances of a Shakespeare play – this year, Romeo & Juliet­ – held in the magnificent arena of Ludlow Castle’s inner bailey. On a warm summer’s evening, as the swifts swoop across a pinkened sky, there can be few more lovely settings.

In the cold rain, it is a species of purgatory.

Alongside the play, other shows, concerts and talks have been put on in an attempt to develop the fortnight into a full-blown arts festival, although somehow this has never really evolved into the recognisably cohesive, focused occasion it could be. Nevertheless, some of the individual events are imaginatively conceived, as was a concert performed by English Ayres on Sunday night in the magnificent, west-facing dining-room of Oakly Park House, three miles north of Ludlow. The Georgian mansion, home of Lord and Lady Windsor, was reordered extensively in the 1820s for Lord Windsor’s ancestor, the Hon Robert Clive by C R Cockerell and is one of his and Shropshire’s finest. Before the concert we stood on the lawn in front of the house, looking  across paddocks and parkland liberally strewn with the venerable oaks that gave the park its name, while we drank a few glasses of champagne.

English Ayres is a trio consisting of Jeni Melia (soprano & violin) Lindsay Braga (violin) and Chris Goodwin (baritone, lute and theorbo). To enhance my appreciation of the event, I went to see and hear them with old friend and lutenist, Damian Russell. We were not disappointed.

Leader Chris Goodwin had made an effort to create a concert that reflected our presence in Marcher country and spanned a wide range of music for such an ensemble. It opened with some hauntingly beautiful settings of medieval songs for violin and soprano by Gustav Holst. The first excitement was hearing Jeni Melia’s unusual and truly breathtaking singing. Untainted by the operatic schools that still encourage a heavy dressing of vibrato, her voice is one of great purity and tonal accuracy, which in some senses put one in mind of a traditional Cathedral boy’s voice.

The Holst was followed by a series of Vaughan Williams’ arrangements of folk songs and Along the Fields, a cycle of poems with a local flavour by A E Houseman.

After a short champagne break, the concert regressed to a musical tour of the 17^th Century Welsh Marches with music by Frances Pilkington, Lord Herbert of Chirbury and other local composers of the early c17th, delivered by Chris Goodwin on lute and theorbo (a kind of double-bass lute), some in his mellifluous baritone voice. This led on to an abridged version of Milton’s early masque, Comus, which had its first performance in Ludlow Castle in 1634. The music for it and the commission for Milton to write the (frankly, pretty lightweight) fantasy came from Henry Lawes, music teacher to the Earl of Bridgewater’s family. The Masque was put on to mark the earl’s inauguration at the castle as Lord Lieutenant to the Marcher counties. It was based on the real story of his daughter, Lady Alice Egerton (Bridgewater’s daughter) and her two brothers getting lost in Haywood Forest while coming back from Herefordshire one summer’s night.

The acoustics in Cockerell’s dining-room were excellent and it was easy to drift back in time to the gentle strains of the lute and the beefier throb of the theorbo while Jeni Melia’s sweet voice with its rare, haunting quality did not flag in a most unusual and beautifully conceived entertainment.

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