ROBERT Marsh reviews Skipton Choral Society's Christmas concert at Christ Church, Skipton.

A LARGE and enthusiastic audience defied the wintry weather to attend this concert with its very attractive programme.

We opened with In Terra Pax by Gerald Finzi, a work that beautifully combines the Biblical narrative with the English Romantic tradition. The orchestra created a suitably pastoral and magical atmosphere at the opening, though with occasional uncertain intonation in the strings. The first entry of the chorus was striking; if diction was not always fully clear from where I was sitting; there was a very good blend of tone, particularly from the sopranos, and the whole choir produced a very satisfying range of dynamic colour.

Jennifer Webb and Christopher Trenholme were the soloists; they showed some technical command and communicated a sense of commitment. Together with the choir, they injected some drama into the performance.

Any concert which features music by Benjamin Britten is bound to discover that the work chosen will be the star turn, and so it was with this concert in its choice of A Ceremony of Carols, unusual in its scoring for double soprano and alto voices, together with a solo harp, and certainly out of the ordinary in that it was composed by Britten during the Second World War on a perilous sea voyage from the United States of America back to England. For this performance, a section of the sopranos and altos of Skipton Choral Society stepped forward, together with conductor Robert Webb singing countertenor.

Choir and soloists coped well overall with the texts of the 11 carols which are principally in Middle English, though with some Latin thrown in as well. Diction was mostly clear, partly as the singers were now standing further forward in this very generous choral acoustic.

It must be said straight away that for maximum effect, this piece gains in effect if the opening Procession and closing Recession are performed with the singers processing in and out of the building. But this takes up a very great deal of precious rehearsal time, and one can well understand the decision not to include movement.

The music is also enhanced by absolute technical security of all the vocal lines, together with a fine blend of tone and rhythmic precision. There were very occasional issues in these regards, but they were more than adequately compensated for by the huge enthusiasm of the singers and their perfectly judged projection of the very different moods of each carol.

And the harp Interlude? Oh, the Interlude! Britten had a fine understanding of this beautiful instrument as he had been considering composing a Harp Concerto. I can think of no other piece of music that so superbly conveys the great mystery that is at the heart of Christmas and Kathryn Mason treated us to what for me was the highlight of the concert.

We concluded with John Rutter’s Magnificat, featuring this composer’s hallmark mastery of melody, choral textures, orchestral colours, and luscious harmonies floating from key to key in glorious modulation.

The choir sang with obvious love and enjoyment, demonstrating an obvious warmth and strong rapport with conductor Robert Webb, who controlled the evening’s proceedings in a calm, undemonstrative manner. Soloist Jennifer Webb tackled the high tessitura of her part head on. There was an excellent balance between chorus and orchestra, and the acoustic led one to believe that much larger forces were in fact performing. There was confidence with the text and the pitching and rhythmic challenges, well rounded tone from the sopranos and good moments from the other parts, too.

All in all, a most enjoyable evening.