Exeter College is ready to celebrate its 700th anniversary with a very special concert. Nicola Lisle discovers more

Hot on the heels of Merton’s 750th anniversary celebrations last month comes another college milestone —– this time it’s Exeter College, marking 700 years since its foundation.

Like Merton, Exeter will be joining forces with Oxford Philomusica for a gala concert, featuring the college choir with Colin Campbell (baritone) and Exeter alumnus Anil Umer (cello).

At the heart of the programme is music by Sir Hubert Parry, one of Exeter’s most famous alumni, along with works by Elgar and Vaughan Williams. There is also a commissioned piece, Flyht, by former Magdalen organ scholar Nicholas O’Neill.

Unusually, Exeter College has no director of music, so it falls to senior Parry-Wood organ scholar George de Voil, a final-year undergraduate, to run the choir, and he has been largely responsible for devising the gala concert programme in conjunction with the music committee. “We’ve got this very talented cello player who’s now on a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music, so we wanted him to have something to do, and we wanted the choir to have something to do, but we didn’t want it to be just a choral concert — we wanted something with slightly broader appeal. So we came up with the idea of centring it around Parry. We’re starting with Blest Pair of Sirens, one of his most wonderful pieces, I think, then in the second half we’re doing some of his unaccompanied pieces, which are very much in our repertoire.

“Anil, the cellist, will play the Elgar Cello Concerto, so that fits in with the Parry era, then Vaughan Williams comes in with Five Mystical Songs after the Parry, and that’ll be really nice because the choir doesn’t have a massive role so it gives it a slightly different musical aesthetic with the wonderful baritone solo. Hopefully that will be a big draw for the audience.”

The new commission by Nicholas O’Neill is based on an 11th- century poem, Phoenix, taken from The Exeter Book, with additional words at the beginning and end by Samuel Wesley, another famous alumnus of the college.

“It’s all about knowledge, and what to do with knowledge,” George explains. “We had a lot of input into the text and what the theme was going to be, and Nicholas was really good at responding to that and writing something that fits well with the choir and is appropriate for the anniversary, so we’re really pleased with it.”

George, who hopes to go on to be a freelance conductor in London after graduating, will be sharing conducting duties at the concert with Marios Papadopoulos, Oxford Philomusica’s founder and artistic director. How, I wondered, did he develop his conducting skills alongside playing the organ?

“I had lessons with Paul Spicer, who used to run the Finzi Singers and did a lot of recordings of English music, so he’s a good choral conductor and teacher. I feel I’ve really developed just through the sheer force of having to do it at services three times a week, and it’s something I enjoy. It’s just a matter of learning how to get things out of people and how to express yourself.

“On the day, it’s not just the concert — it’s part of Founder’s Day, so it’s going to be one of the biggest days in our celebratory calendar.”

Exeter College 700: Sir Hubert and his Contemporaries
University Church of St Mary the Virgin, Oxford
Friday, April 4, 7pm
Tickets: Call 01865 305305 or www.ticketsoxford.com