The concert was a pleasant mixture of different styles of music. Being in church prompted some cherished sacred music in the choice of Vivaldi’s Gloria, Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, Sibelius’s Be Still My Soul from Finlandia and the Sanctus from Gounod’s Mass of St Cecilia.

More recent music in this vein was in the form of two negro spirituals Let my People Go and Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho and a selection from Jesus Christ Superstar.
Grand opera was represented by the drinking song from La Traviata and Jan Self gave a splendid rendition of I Want to Sing in Opera, and we had a duet from Phantom of the Opera.

The rest of the programme was made up of excerpts from the musicals with the exception of Sullivan’s Lost Chord and Ronald Binns’ Where the gentle Avon Flows.
The concert ended with a selection of Rodgers and Hammerstein songs and included, appropriately enough, bearing in mind the England football team’s exploits in Portugal, You’ll Never Walk Alone.

The conductor was Kenneth McAllister and the accompanist Andrew Holtom.

Rev Ian Kitteringham