IT IS greatly to the credit of Stephen Williams and his choir that they should have dedicated an entire programme to Remembrance Day. A renewed appreciation of our defence forces is abroad in the land and there is plenty of good remembrance music that cannot easily be accommodated within a religious observance.

A robust account of Tallis’s Salvator Mundi, sung from the antechamber, led into Andrew Carter’s more prayerful, chordal setting of ‘I expect to pass through this world but once’, entitled An Affirmation. Two of Parry’s Songs of Farewell were doubly poignant, written during World War One and reminding us of Parry’s death a mere month before the Armistice. Here, though its chording was excellent, the choir was a touch cautious: the crucial rests, for example, at the end of My Soul, There Is A Country were unduly distended.

Philip Moore’s ubiquitous Prayers of Dietrich Bonhoeffer gained from the choir’s dynamic extremes, especially the final Evening Prayers. But it’s now time for choirs to explore his many other works.

Final consonants proved elusive throughout the second half. That aside, the first two of Stanford’s Three Motets were positively caressed, so telling was their phrasing, and three movements from Howells’s Requiem were remarkable for some beautifully sustained pianissimos.

Sven-David Sandström’s extension of Purcell’s Hear My Prayer – already a miniature masterpiece – sounded like musical vandalism. But Elgar’s inspired setting of Newman’s They Are at Rest was dead on target. A moving evening.