HOWARD WALLACE CHORALE

MUSIC FOR A SUMMER'S EVENING

Howard Wallace Chorale at the Bishops Hill Centre

09.07.11

Choral singing has been dragged back into the limelight, thanks to the likes of Gareth Malone and Last Choir Standing. No longer confined to the madrigal, the church or the valleys, the genre has embraced Broadway and the charts.

This is the populist path long followed with great success by the wonderful Howard Wallace Chorale. And last Saturday, under the imposing Bishop Hill roof, I finally heard what all the plaudits are about.

They began [and ended, in fact] with Bridge Over Troubled Water, sung from memory, and their Summer Evening music meandered through Elgar, Stanford, Copland at the classical end, and Harold Arlen, Swing Low and Unchained Melody from the Easy Listening shelf. Which also included a new arrangement of Wonderful World by the choir's founder, Howard Wallace, who has now passed the baton to their present charismatic conductor Tim Rhys-Morgan. The hard-working accompanist was Steven Miller.

Three choir members sang showpieces – Marion Davies the Novello favourite Waltz of my Heart, Angela Rose a beautifully phrased number from Showboat, and Angela Broad, in a fetching feather boa, that virtuosic party piece from Herbert's The Enchantress. Nostalgic Friday Night fare.

There were two generous medleys, too, from Lennon and McCartney and the Abba jukebox musical Mamma Mia.

A welcome change of pace and style from the generally relaxed tempi of this repertoire was Copland's Little Horses, sung with panache and precision by the ladies alone.