Throughout the concert by Monmouth Choral Society at St Mary’s Priory Church, Monmouth, on Saturday, the choir impressed with their polished and confident singing, proficiently directed by Steven Kings writes Robert Peate.

Taking on a variety of roles, their attention to detail conveyed a confidence as well as a range and depth in their sound. Sam Bayliss provided the piano accompaniment, displaying a sensitive responsiveness and colouristic variety. Baritone Rob Prichard was a superb soloist, impressing with his lyrical elegance and consummate technical control.

The programme began with Stanford’s Songs of the Fleet – a sequel to his earlier Songs of the Sea, and one of his finer works. The various exchanges between soloist and choir were well balanced, and Prichard captured the wistful, reflective, often dark-edged lyricism of the work from the off. The third song ‘The Middle-Watch’ was particularly mesmeric with its hushed hymn-like echoes in the chorus over a shimmering, liquid, almost impressionist piano part. The final song ‘Fare Well’ drew us deeper into a more spiritual realm, with echoes of his student Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony (both works were premiered at the 1910 Leeds Festival), and which gave Prichard and the choir the perfect vehicle to bring the tender simplicity and pensive beauty of the music to the fore.

Prichard returned at the end of the evening for Vaughan Williams’s Five Mystical Songs. Seemingly picking up where we left off with Stanford (the music also showing connections to A Sea Symphony), this bookending gave a satisfying sense of unity to the end of the programme. The baritone and piano passages showed an acute and sensitive musical connection between Prichard and Bayliss, and the few moments where Prichard enjoyed hanging a solo line in the churches acoustic, were magical.

Between these two song cycles were the piano duet version of Warlock’s Capriol Suite, Copland’s Old American Songs (Set 2), and Britten’s Choral Dances from Gloriana.

Bayliss and Kings brought the lively, perky rhythms, and the ye olde, quirky harmony (pushed to an extremely quirky level in the final movement) of the Capriol Suite off with characterful assurance, whilst also bringing out a sense of orchestral variety.

Old American Songs showed Copland also looking back to older music, and this collection features characteristic contrasts between an open-aired, tender and windswept sentimentalism, and Copland’s vintage jaunty, um-pah dance rhythms – all of which the choir brought out in impressive detail, enhanced by Bayliss’s nuanced accompaniment – summing up a truly orchestral impression in many of the passages.

Britten was looking back to an Elizabethan world in his opera Gloriana, and this suite of Choral Dances features many challenges which the choir met with considerable skill and confidence. The stark and buoyant interweaving parts, the high dancing lines in ‘Country girls’, and the brevity of ‘Rustics and fisherman’ were impressive, and the “Gloriana”’s at the end of the third song ‘Time and concord’, were suitably glorious!

Monmouth Choral Society continue to present stimulating and imaginatively curated concerts, with orchestra, of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius on 22nd November.