The David le Page Trio at the Deal Festival

Following a performance of David le Page's The Hall of Bright Carvings at the Deal Festival of Arts & Music on 1st December, the audience rose as one in an outpouring of sustained vocal enthusiasm. This poignant, profound, and very powerful musical homage to the life and work of both Mervyn Peake, and his wife Maeve Gilmore, touched hearts and minds. To such an extent that apart from the intellectual impact the words and music had on those at the concert, numerous moist eyes attested to the emotional impact the sixteen short pieces had provoked. In short, a tour de force in which the composer lured the listener into his world, one which through his music, convinced us conclusively that he knew his subject through and through.

Having achieved great success earlier this year, performing the same work before an audience of over 350 at St James's Church, St Peter Port, Guernsey, and repeated in mid-summer in front of an even large public, le Page has now added a coda, Maeve Gilmore's conclusion to the Titus books having now been published. In her denouement to the sequence of books, the eponymous character, Titus Groan, arrives back on Sark, where in a scene unprecedented in all literature, both originator and character meet to become one.