Wordsworth Singers, Holy Trinity and St George’s Catholic Church, Kendal

A small but enthusiastic audience greeted the Wordsworth Singers for their concert entitled Light of Flanders with repertoire drawn from the period c.1400 to 1600 when an important group of northern European composers exerted such a huge influence on the development on Renaissance polyphony.

This fine award-winning choir (Cumbria Life Culture Award 2015, Choir of the Year) draws its membership mainly from north Cumbria and makes infrequent visits to the south of the county. The choir’s conductor, Mark Hindley, is a professional musician with a well-established reputation for his work as an organist and choir trainer. His excellent, informative and scholarly notes in the beautifully produced programme helped to place this largely unfamiliar repertoire in perspective.

The choir makes a very robust sound. An hour and a half of unaccompanied singing is a challenge to any choir but the Wordsworth Singers rose to this. They are fortunate in having many voices of good quality to draw upon to form smaller units within the main body when required and there were some lovely moments when these smaller units were used to give contrasts of colour and texture.

Renaissance polyphony sets a challenge for singers: they need to stay in tune, of course, and, at the same time, be able to sustain and shape long melodic lines smoothly, maintaining pure vowel sounds. All this, the choir did well. However, the balance between the various parts was not always quite so successful. Numerically, the sopranos and basses far outweighed the altos and tenors and there were times when the melodic lines of the inner parts were obscured by the very strong soprano line. Perhaps the resonant church acoustic - which is wonderful for this repertoire - may have been partly responsible for this. However, it was a joy to hear this marvellous music performed with such expertise in Kendal.

Clive Walkley