THE Mary Wakefield Westmorland Music Festival is but a month away and chairman Jolyon Dodgson and his hard working team are poised and ready.

Within the remarkable festival's inner circle of volunteers is widely respected choral conductor and festival chorus master, Ian Jones, who will be donning his tuxedo and once again exude the quiet authority for which is renowned.

Ian is conductor and founder of Levens Choir, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this year and has a fine reputation for high standards of performance and adventurous programming.

He also conducts Eversley Choir and is musical director and founder of Cumbria Choral Initiative for which its 2001 Finzi Centenary Festival will long be remembered far and wide.

However, for now all his energy is focused on the forthcoming Mary Wakefield gathering, which opens with a rock, pop and jazz fun day on Saturday, March 14, at Kendal's Queen Katherine School Music Suite.

Ian also chairs the sub-committee which organises the choral events and is keen to point out major changes to this year's festival structure.

"The festival in all its aspects is run by an efficient and focused committee chaired by Jolyon and for the 2015 festival we've taken the decision to split it into three separate parts.

"The restructuring has resulted from the pressure on the committee resulting from everything happening within one week," continues Ian. "Also because the choral events are by far the most expensive aspect of the festival and really need to be dealt with separately from the much cheaper adjudicated events."

The adjudicated festival runs from March 14-21 with the Choral Celebration on March 21. The choral concerts will be Come and Sing, July 11, Herdwyck Consort concert, also July 11, and Dvorak's Stabat Mater performance on July 12. The schools events come later on October 16.

This, Ian explains, will enable the committee to concentrate more fully and efficiently on each separate event.

"I'll be rehearsing the chorus for the Dvorak and then conducting the concert."

Ian was a graduate of Liverpool University and sang with the Liverpool Philharmonic Choir under Sir Charles Groves.

Born and brought up at Widnes, Merseyside, aged 11 he went to boarding school in Lancaster.

"My parents were very keen on classical music, took us regularly to the Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool, and were themselves singers in the church choir and local choral society.

"Music and singing were just part of life from as far back as I can remember."

Ian's parents also loved folk dancing which became a regular feature of life - a weekly club, Saturday night dances and folk dance holidays in the summer.

Weekly attendance at the local Methodist church and Sunday School meant regular hymn singing and soon young Ian was singing in his primary school choir.

"At school in Lancaster I was in every possible choir and stage musical – usually Gilbert and Sullivan."

Picking up the baton though came quite by chance: "I had never had any thoughts about conducting until the Levens Young Wives, in 1975, said they would like to start a singing group and asked Margaret (Mrs Jones) to ask me if I would lead it. That’s how Levens Choir started. The baton itself came some years later on the first occasion I had an orchestra as well as the choir."

He has also, after a brief hiatus, returned to the ranks of the illustrious Halle Chorus.

"Singing has always been important to me and with doing so much conducting I wasn’t able to sing nearly as much as I wanted and I do love the big scale choral stuff; that’s why I joined the Halle in the first place.

"It’s also an opportunity to work with the finest choral directors and conductors and learn more about how to do it: important when one conducts choirs oneself."

As well as Mary Wakefield, there is plenty in the pipeline for Ian on the choral front not least Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas and Britten’s Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard at Kendal Town Hall on June 28 and a Songs of Praise as part of the Magna Carta Festival in Cartmel Priory on September 29, both with Levens Choir.

He also plays piano accordion, concertina, keyboard and (very occasionally) hurdy gurdy in a ceilidh band with his wife Margaret.

From 1968 to 1972 Ian taught English at Appleby after which, apart from a brief time in County Durham and three years teaching music at Dalton-in-Furness, taught from 1977 to 2005 at Heversham Grammar School then Dallam School: "Those were 28 wonderful years where I taught English but was able to develop my own interest in drama and introduce it into the curriculum and put on regular stage productions, including musicals.

"I was very lucky to be able to run the school’s choirs and to be involved in many of the musical activities."

Ian sees a healthy future for choral music.

"When one looks, for instance, at Mary Wakefield Festival programmes from the first half of the last century one can be easily disheartened at the huge numbers of singers in choirs of the time and think we've nothing like that level of interest now.

"There was a real decline in the 1970s and 1980s nationally but with media coverage of such as the Choir of the Year competition and that of Let the People Sing, the rise of professional groups like The Sixteen and The King’s Singers, all hugely encouraged by the ‘Gareth Malone’ effect we’re now seeing the interest in choral singing growing rapidly and nowhere more than in South Lakeland.

"Singing is such a healthy, liberating and personal activity I feel very strongly the importance of being able to motivate and inspire singers to believe in themselves and their capacity to achieve more than they perhaps thought they could. For me activities like choral singing and dancing bring people together, achieve the seemingly impossible and allow them to express themselves in a way few other activities allow.

"I have been incredibly blessed and privileged to have been surrounded and supported by people who have shared the same interests and enthusiasms as me.

"Perhaps the most wonderful and satisfying aspect is the increasing involvement of young people and the extraordinary commitment, energy and talent that they show. I am certain that our Choral Scholarship Scheme in Levens Choir is the most important thing we do."