The Three Choirs festival has a long tradition of presenting new British works and displaying an admirable loyalty to composers with local associations. In this concert, works from past festivals by Elgar and Parry contrasted with this year's commission from the Hereford-based composer Anthony Powers.
Elgar's concert overture Froissart, commissioned for the Worcester festival of 1890, is a mixture of solidity and meandering melody; its resonant brass writing helped establish one of the evening's common threads. Hubert Parry's motet Voces Clamantium was written for the Hereford festival a century ago; it sought to get away from 19th-century tradition by reverting to the early Baroque tendency to link choral and solo sections with a ritornello. Here, soprano Carys Lane and baritone Matthew Brook were the reliable soloists, with the resplendent Festival Chorus and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Adrian Lucas, revelling in the sound.
Powers's Air and Angels is a striking setting of love poems by John Donne, conceived in seven sections that merge imperceptibly into a continuous arching sequence. At its heart is the dark and intense A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy's Day and a tightly wrought duet between the impassioned soloists, Lane and Brook. The overall quality of the work is indeed darker than the title would suggest, with the vast instrumental forces - broadly the same as Parry's with the addition of tuned percussion, electric guitars and bass drum - underlining the sense of deep tumult. Its alchemy was at its strongest when textures were at their most translucent, with moments of serenity and ecstasy, as when the cor anglais emerged like a gold halo from the body of sound, or during the high woodwind passages that ascended like a flurry of wings.
It says much for this committed performance of Air and Angels, under the direction of Geraint Bowen, that the scenes from Romeo and Juliet by Prokofiev seemed oddly superfluous, however passionate. But that hardly constitutes a complaint.
