Here is a most congenial programme, ending with a tour de force which must be brought forward into the light and accorded first welcome. Leslie Heward will be remembered, by older readers at least, as a skilled and tasteful orchestral conductor who died just as he was making a name for himself in 1943. He was also a composer, and in 1919 wrote a piece for the Challenge Shield Choirs of the following year’s Morecambe Festival. A cappella, fearsome in its demands upon the vitality, musicianship and sheer stamina of its singers (any choir coping with this challenge fully deserved the shield), the work is also great fun. Each section of the choir has its own moment of glory (or ignominy); they have to get their tongues round some toothsome words; and, with their director, they need a sense of pace and drama. The witches’ sabbath is a setting of verses by Ben Jonson, from The Masque of Queens, which in 1609 was mounted at a cost of thousands of pounds (costumes alone accounting for nearly two) and for which Inigo Jones designed a cavern “flaming beneath... with a kind of hollow and infernal music”. It is a pity they could not have had Leslie Heward’s.
The rest of the programme (moving through it backwards) also has its pleasures and surprises. Of Edgar Bainton’s three part-songs, most imaginative is In the wilderness, to lines by Robert Graves. Arthur Benjamin’s Mystical Pieces culminate in a fine one, “He is the lonely greatness of the world”. Moeran’s Irish elegy is in fact an arrangement by Desmond Ratcliffe of a movement from his last published work, Serenade, and, with words by Lawrence Swinyard, forms a moving personal tribute to the composer.
The Songs of Springtime are the best-known works here. They open the programme and also introduce the matter of performance, for here the City Chamber Choir have to confront the Finzi Singers. Now, it must be said that they (the Finzis) are better – they have (or sound as though they have) the better voices, and there is a more assured and resourceful professionalism. Even so, I wonder how they would sound in the Vestry Hall of the London College of Music, where the City Chamber Choir recorded this programme. Merciless in its clarity, absolute in its cut-off at the end of a chord, it leaves a choir with no escape or possibility of cover-up. The singers here do remarkably well, and their record deserves every success.'