The choral years

Those are the same six years in which he was associate conductor of the BBC Welsh Orchestra in Cardiff, so the two posts, one orchestral and Welsh, one choral and Yorkshire, ran side by side.

What a British lay choral society is

A lay choral society is an amateur chorus with a professional standard of repertoire, and the word lay is the load bearing part of the phrase. Its members audition but are not paid. They hold subscriptions, rehearse one evening a week through an autumn to spring season, and buy or hire their own vocal scores. For a concert the society hires the professional element around itself: an orchestra, four or five soloists, and a hall. The music director is engaged on a contract, and the society is run by a committee of its own members.

That structure is Victorian and specifically northern industrial. Societies of this kind grew out of the manufacturing towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire in the first half of the nineteenth century, while the same towns were building the town halls their choirs would sing in. Huddersfield, founded in 1836, is the most durable example, and its home is Huddersfield Town Hall, opened in 1881 with an organ built for it.

The distinction from a professional chorus is worth stating once. A professional chorus, such as the one Welsh National Opera has carried since 1943, is paid, contracted and available in daytime rehearsal. A lay society is none of those things, which changes how a conductor prepares it: the work is learned in weekly evening rehearsals across months, and the result depends on continuity of membership rather than on any power to hire and dismiss.

Messiah, and why it is the fixed point of the year

Handel's Messiah is the work every British choral society performs, and Huddersfield's association with it is the strongest of any chorus in the country. Handel wrote it in 1741. It runs in three parts, takes about two and a quarter hours complete, and was written for modest forces: a small orchestra and a few dozen singers. What happened to it afterwards is the history of British choral singing in one work: by the Crystal Palace Handel Festivals, which began in 1857, it was being sung by choirs of several thousand, and the massed style those festivals established is what the Victorian societies existed to supply.

Huddersfield's Messiah is a December fixture and has been for generations, which is why the society's name is attached to the work in the public mind. Its recordings with Sir Malcolm Sargent, made for Columbia from the 1940s, were for a long period the standard British Messiah on record. The December programme of such a society usually pairs Messiah with a carol concert, and those two evenings carry a disproportionate share of the year's income.

Hallelujah is the chorus everybody knows, and it closes Part 2, not the work; Part 3 continues past it and the piece ends with the Amen chorus. A conductor taking a lay society through Messiah is managing an expectation as much as a score.

The repertoire a choral directorship carries

The repertoire of a British choral society directorship is a short list of very large works, repeated on a rotation of a few years, and the practical question with each is what forces it demands. A society that cannot field the chorus numbers, or afford the extra brass, cannot programme the piece.

Belshazzar's Feast is the work that separates a good society from an ambitious one. Walton wrote it for the Leeds Triennial Festival in 1931, where the chorus was exactly this kind of Yorkshire amateur body, and the two extra brass bands were added because the festival had them available. The choral writing is rhythmically brutal by the standards of anything a Victorian society had sung, and it is still the piece choir members name when asked what was hard.

The Dream of Gerontius is the opposite problem. Its difficulty is blend and stamina rather than rhythm, and its history is a warning: the Birmingham premiere in 1900 went badly enough to wound Elgar for years, and the work had to be rescued by German performances before England accepted it.

The hymn tunes underneath all of it

Underneath the oratorio repertoire sits congregational hymn singing, and the traffic runs both ways. Choral societies drew their singers from chapel and church choirs, where sight reading was learned free of charge. Several of the best known English language hymns are carried by Welsh tunes, which is one practical reason Welsh and Yorkshire choral culture resemble each other so closely.

• Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise. Words by Walter Chalmers Smith, 1867, sung to the Welsh tune ST DENIO, printed in Caniadau y Cyssegr in 1839.
• Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer. A Welsh hymn text by William Williams Pantycelyn, sung to CWM RHONDDA by John Hughes, written in 1907.
• Love Divine, All Loves Excelling. Words by Charles Wesley, 1747, most often sung in Wales and in Yorkshire to BLAENWERN by William Rowlands.

Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau, written in Pontypridd in 1856 with words by the weaver Evan James and a tune by his son James James, a harpist, belongs to the same tradition of four part singing in a small industrial town. It became the Welsh national anthem by custom and not by statute, since no Act ever adopted it, and although it has three verses and a chorus, the first verse and the chorus are what gets sung.

Why the Yorkshire years matter to the rest of the record

The six years at Huddersfield gave the career something the orchestral posts could not, which is a working relationship with hundreds of unpaid singers who turn up because they want to. Choral conducting is a different craft: the beat has to be slower to read, the breathing has to be built into the gesture, and the words have to be audible at the back of a town hall. A conductor who has run one knows how long it takes to teach an entrance to 200 people who cannot be rehearsed on a Tuesday afternoon. That knowledge never shows up in a discography, and it is why such posts keep appearing in the biographies of conductors who went on to build festivals.

Also in this programme

• Owain Arwel Hughes, conductor: the working life in orderA biography of the working life
• The London orchestrasPhilharmonia and the Royal Philharmonic
• Boult, Haitink and Kempe: how a conductor was trainedThe teachers: Boult, Haitink and Kempe
• The large choral worksThe big choral works