Levens Choir, Cartmel Priory

Levens Choir celebrated two anniversaries: the 400th of the death of Shakespeare, and the 40th of the foundation of the choir. Their conductor and founder Ian Jones had put together a very well-planned programme of settings of English music and verse: words by Shakespeare and his contemporaries and by more modern poets, together with readings from Shakespeare and others. It was a varied and well-balanced programme, in which the audience’s interest was held throughout.

The programme notes (also by Ian Jones - this man works hard for his choir!) set out many of the words of the songs in full. The notes were a good read in themselves, even had the music not taken place.

The programme included some unfamiliar pieces (unfamiliar to this reviewer, at least), whose discovery was one of the many pleasures of this concert. One such was the wonderful motet Faire is the Heaven, setting words by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser to music for double choir by William Henry Harris. The choir gave this a splendid performance for which the Cartmel Priory acoustic was very well suited.

More familiar were the three Shakespeare songs by Vaughan Williams, written as a test piece for a 1951 music festival. In the first of these, Full Fathom Five, the choir imitates the sound of church bells. Some forty strong and standing on the chancel steps, the choir was spread rather widely, so that the singers on the outermost extremities sometimes found it hard to remain fully in touch with the rest of the choir. This is often a difficulty when choirs perform to an audience, because churches are usually designed for antiphonal singing with the choir members facing each other across the chancel, rather than looking towards an audience. But the moments of slight raggedness were few and brief.

This was followed by works by Benjamin Britten, John Rutter, and finally Welcome Sweet and Sacred Feast by Gerald Finzi. This brought to an end a concert which had been most satisfying in both its structure and its performance.

Martin Widden