BBC Singers/Spicer Singers at Six by Vaughan Williams, Howard, E., De la (2019/2019), Dirijor Paul Spicer, St Giles Cripplegate, London, United Kingdom

From the urgent to the idyllic, the BBC Singers present visionary choral music from one of the masters of the twentieth century. Emily Howard’s penetrating trio for two voices Threnos sits in the midst of this exploration of the choral world of Ralph Vaughan Williams in which the BBC Singers and guest conductor Paul Spicer anticipate the evening performance of the composer’s Fifth Symphony. Vaughan Williams responded to some of the most striking imagery of the Old Testament with choral works of thrusting power and pictorial energy, not least in his Ezekiel-inspired A Vision of Aeroplanes in which the accompanying organ becomes a swooping, roaring flying machine. With the composer’s distinctively idyllic voice shining through his Five English Folk Songs, this concert presents the breadth of Vaughan Williams’s expressive world in microcosm.