MINEHEAD and Exmoor Music Festival’s 62nd season launched on Saturday (July 26) in Minehead Methodist Church with the much-loved young musicians’ recital, given by Ginevra Dobson (soprano) and Matilde White (violin).

Ginevra, at 15, already an accomplished regional soloist, introduced her programme with warmth, clarity, and wit, and sang by heart in their four languages, songs by Handel, Schumann, Fauré, and Puccini.

Particularly moving was her subtly nuanced depiction of a child’s nursery world in ‘Goodnight Moon’ by the American contemporary composer Eric Edward Whitacre.

This young lady showed emotional maturity and technical poise well beyond her years.

Matilde, 16, a leading music scholar and concerto competition winner at Taunton School, has also shone at national level.

Her love of virtuosity, accompanied by her touching warmth of tone, presented a combination promising well for the future.

Matilda began unhesitatingly with a famously difficult and glamorous piece by Charles de Beriot (Scène de Ballet) which she accomplished with aplomb and relish.

Then came an unaccompanied Giga by J.S.Bach and the Praeludim and Allegro by the great violinist Fritz Kreisler.

Both recitalists and accompanist Gareth Dayus Jones were given an enthusiastic welcome by an attentive audience.

The festival’s orchestral week glided to life on Monday in the Regal Theatre under the spell of much-loved English musical magic, the Tallis Fantasia by Ralph Vaughan-Williams (1872-1958), a work for string orchestra which explores the pastoral and sacred possibilities of a hymn tune by the 16th century English composer Thomas Tallis.

Festival artistic director and conductor Christopher Stark wisely chose the calmness and dignity of this spell-binding string music as a fitting prelude to the excitement and virtuosity to follow from the full orchestra.

French horn soloist Jonathan Farey made the bold instrumental announcement at the opening of Richard Strauss’s second Horn Concerto (1942) before entering an energetically bustling discussion with the orchestra, which later mellowed into serenity and became the lyrical Andante movement, which soloist and orchestra presented with charm and elegance.

The concluding Rondo was an energetically competitive romp of lively arpeggios through kaleidoscopic key changes, an exhilarating union of the veteran composer’s affection for his horn-playing father and Farey’s evident love of his instrument.

Post interval, the opening grandeur and sweetness of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony (1813) beckoned to the great feast of the evening.

Composed in time of Napoleonic war, partly to welcome home wounded soldiers, this music speaks to us also in today’s world with renewed eloquence.

The third (Scherzo) movement threw all instruments into a breathless chase, briefly calmed by the two Trios.

However, the best was left to the last.

Beethoven’s tumultuous concluding Allegro con brio was simply breathtaking.

The Regal’s fabric as well as its audience were surely stirred and shaken by the outrageous Bacchanalian excess of this splendid orchestra’s whole-hearted embrace of Beethoven’s finest music.

More magic is to come during the week, and in the unmissable finale of this year’s Minehead festival with music by Butterworth, Schumann and Sibelius on Saturday, August 2, at 7.30 pm in the Regal.

Keith Jones