THIS was one of the pleasant coffee concerts the Ryedale Festival organisers can feel happy about. It is a special experience to be able to enjoy a cup of coffee in a beautiful natural location, and St Mary’s Church in Lastingham is surely one of the loveliest settings in England.

The church is founded on an ancient place of Christian worship dating from St Cedd of Lindisfarne in 654 and developed by St Steven in the 11th century.

Having paid due tribute to the building, it must be said it perhaps does not enjoy the friendliest of acoustics for the trumpet, which was the solo instrument in the Music and Colour event in review.

In addition to passages from The Water Music by Handel, Elgar’s Salut d’Amour and John McCabe’s Sonata after Wm Byrd’s Haec Dies, two new works were being premiered, Edwin Roxburgh’s Pro patria mori and Seven Halts on the Somme by Deborah Pritchard, who presented her Music and Colour composition.

Pritchard explained the theme, a set of seven short movements for trumpet and piano composed in response to a new series of paintings by artist Hughie O’Donoghue depicting seven stopping points for the British Army along the Somme.

The movements illustrated various moods of conflict – aggressive, poignant, melancholic, evocative of all the tragedy of war, and the trumpet did full justice to the work. Pritchard provided a commentary on the significance of the colour to the music.

Pianist Clare Hammond accompanied the trumpet excellently, and performed a very beautiful solo nocturne by Ivor Gurney.

Simon Desbruslais demonstrated brilliantly the variety of effects which can be achieved, changing instruments several times from standard trumpet to flugelhorn and piccolo trumpet. He has an impressive range and hopes to work with composers to address the scarcity of dedicated music, as he did with Edwin Roxburgh in his Pro patria mori piece.

Irene MacDonald