ALAN Moore is a man who believes in pushing his choir hard. In their summer showcase he put together a programme that showed their talents to the full (and maybe pushed them a little beyond).

It was made up of a sequence of pieces, many of them very taxing vocally, and much of the programme unaccompanied, which they sang with only a minimal interval to provide any respite.

In this time they covered a lot of musical ground – from settings of Welsh songs by Mansel Thomas and Duruflé’s ethereal motet Ubi Caritas to English sacred music by Boyce and Prince Albert, to modern popular arrangements.

They were very much at home in Arcadelt’s Margot Labourez Les Vignes composed in the mid-16th century as well as in the modern clustered harmonies of Morten Lauridsen’s in O Nata Lux.

Their performances, sung in Russian, of Tchaikowsky and Rachmaninov, were also memorable.

However their rather idiosyncratic renderings of popular songs such as Billy Joel’s Lullabye and And So It Goes, and the lovely You Are The New Day were too strait-laced and needed a greater sense of space to allow their very direct emotion to speak.

As always with this choir they sang with control and restraint (the bell-like sopranos deserve a special pat on the back) though there were times when it all seemed like a little of a test of stamina.

How the programme would have benefited from a soloist or two to provide contrast and give voices a break.