SPRING CONCERT

Waltham Singers in the Parish Church

19.06.10

It's fifty years since the death of Armstrong Gibbs, and this enterprising programme was one of several concerts in his home county marking this anniversary.

It featured works by his teacher, Vaughan Williams [the familiar Three Shakespeare Songs] and his contemporaries Howells [Take Him Earth for Cherishing] and Parry – a wonderfully stirring Blest Pair of Sirens, with Robert Poyser getting the most out of the Waltham organ.

The same forces for Gibbs' Cantata for Passiontide, Behold The Man. Dramatic choruses, linked by narration, beginning with How Beautiful on the Mountains, and ending with a note of triumph. Conductor Andrew Fardell, and his sizeable choir, made excellent advocates for this neglected work.

Unaccompanied works included Dryden's Pleasures of Love, and Five Elizabethan Lyrics. Sleep was something of a theme – a lovely diminuendo at the end of The Cloud-Capp'd Towers, and Gibbs' “Come Sleep”, preceded by his setting of an Evening Prayer, “Before Sleep”, with a tellingly simple beginning and end. And Walter De La Mare's Five Eyes, very enjoyably rendered by the women's voices with Poyser at the piano.

He also gave us Gibbs's eight Lakeland Pictures, charming miniatures written in 1940 when World War Two took him to Westmorland.