Chepstow Choral Society and Orchestra, St Mary's Priory Church (From South Wales Argus)

Chepstow Choral Society and Orchestra, St Mary's Priory Church

12:26pm Monday 29th June 2009

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Not many British choral societies will have marked the 250th anniversary of Handel's death as wholeheartedly and with such originality as Chepstow's.

Two substantial works, themselves written in a spirit of celebration, were yoked to a couple of purely orchestral ones in an all-Handel programme.

And few can have performed such works in a way that better illustrated our thoroughgoing amateur choral tradition, with a full house in attendance.

Festivities opened with the four Coronation Anthems, sung in their entirety and, of course, beginning with that God-given introduction to Zadok the Priest.

Here Handel keeps musical difficulty to a minimum, but by the final The King Shall Rejoice is about to throw the phrases into the mincer of a double fugue that requires the singers to be even more attentive to the spirit of proclamation.

It's a tough call, but the choir and its orchestra, conducted purposefully by Graham Bull, breached the obstacles, not least by floating the penultimate and seductive My Heart is Inditing without effort.

The orchestra lifted the Dettingen Te Deum with suitably bright martial effects, the progress of the work stately, the choruses majestic and the hived-off semi-chorus (sopranos Angela Ham, Gillian Lambert, Sue Carter) and impressive baritone solos (Roger Martin) particularly effective. Elsewhere, solo items were taken by full choir sections.

It could all be bombastic but somehow it isn’t. In any case, Arrival of the Queen of Sheba and the Concerto Grosso Op 6 No 12 allowed the orchestra to continue the Baroque theme by different and jaunty means.

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