The large choral works

The others are Verdi's Requiem, Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius, the two Bach Passions, Brahms's German Requiem and Orff's Carmina Burana. Between 100 and 200 amateur singers, four professional soloists, an orchestra and a hall: that is the shape of the whole category, and the differences between the works are differences of degree within it.

Messiah, and the gap between what Handel wrote and what is sung

Messiah was composed in 1741 and first performed in Dublin the following year, with forces modest by later standards: a chorus drawn from two cathedral choirs, a small string band with trumpets and drums, and soloists who also sang in the choruses. The scale it acquired afterwards had nothing to do with him, and nineteenth century festival performances at the Crystal Palace fielded choruses of several thousand.

The consequence for a modern society is a decision taken before the first rehearsal. Sung with 200 voices and a large orchestra, the choruses acquire weight and lose their counterpoint, because a fugal entry with 50 singers on it does not articulate. Sung with 40 voices and period instruments, the counterpoint returns and the sheer noise of the Hallelujah chorus does not. The choice determines everything from tempo to how many string players are hired.

The other decision is what to cut: most performances make cuts in Parts Two and Three, which is why running times vary so widely.

The Verdi Requiem and its four returns of the Dies irae

Verdi's Requiem of 1874 is scored for four soloists, double chorus and orchestra, runs about 85 minutes, and is among the loudest works in the group. Verdi wrote it in memory of the novelist Alessandro Manzoni and conducted the first performance in San Marco in Milan on the first anniversary of Manzoni's death.

The Dies irae is the structural fact worth knowing. Verdi does not set the sequence once and move on: its opening music returns four times across the work, hammering back after long stretches of quiet, and each return resets the listener to the same point of terror. The device is operatic, which is the standard complaint against the piece. The complaint misses that a requiem is a text about judgement and that Verdi took the text at its word.

One passage decides whether a performance succeeds: the Sanctus, a double fugue for two four part choirs taken fast, which few amateur choruses bring off cleanly.

Gerontius: a disaster in Birmingham, a rescue in Germany

Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius of 1900 sets a poem by Cardinal John Henry Newman for mezzo-soprano, tenor and bass soloists, chorus and orchestra, and its first performance at the Birmingham Festival was a failure. The reasons were practical: the chorus master had died during preparation, the chorus had not learned an idiom far more chromatic than anything it had sung, the copying was late, and there was not enough rehearsal.

The rescue came from Germany. Performances at Dusseldorf under Julius Buths, who translated the text, established the work on the continent within two years and forced a reassessment in England. It remains difficult: the chorus divides into semi-chorus and full chorus and sings much unaccompanied music, and the tenor role is long and unrelieved.

The other four

Four more works complete the working repertoire, each demanding something the others do not.

• Bach's St Matthew Passion needs two choruses and two orchestras, physically separated, a third body of singers for the opening chorale, and an Evangelist who can sustain narrative recitative across the whole work.
• Bach's St John Passion is shorter and needs a single chorus, which makes it the more practical of the two for a society with limited numbers.
• Brahms's German Requiem sets texts Brahms chose himself from the Lutheran Bible rather than the Latin Mass, in seven movements, with only two soloists. It is the most economical of the group in soloist costs and the most demanding in choral stamina, because the chorus sings almost continuously.
• Orff's Carmina Burana needs three soloists, a large chorus, a boys' choir, two pianos and five or more percussionists, and exists in a reduced version for exactly that combination without orchestra, which is why it appears so often on amateur programmes.

What a choral society actually has to do

Mounting one of these takes a choral society most of a season, and the musical preparation is the smaller half of the job.

1. Choose the work a season ahead, because the hall, the orchestra and the soloists are all engaged a year or more in advance.
2. Obtain the vocal scores, bought outright for out of copyright works such as Messiah and hired for anything still in copyright.
3. Rehearse weekly from September under a chorus master, with an accompanist, usually two hours a week across two terms.
4. Engage the soloists and a freelance orchestra assembled for the date, since an amateur society has no resident band.
5. Hold one orchestral rehearsal, sometimes two, in which the chorus hears the real accompaniment for the first time and the conductor has three hours to fix everything.
6. Recover the costs from ticket income, since the singers are subscription paying members rather than paid performers.

The Huddersfield Choral Society, founded in 1836, shows how large this can get: a lay society rather than a professional chorus, but one with an unbroken performing history of nearly two centuries. Owain Arwel Hughes was its music director from 1980 to 1986. The gap between that kind of institution and a village choir of 30 is why the list above is so short. There are only so many works that 150 unpaid singers can prepare in two terms and that will still fill a hall, and those are the works that keep coming back.

Also in this programme

• The repertoireThe pieces that keep coming back, and why
• Edward ElgarThe Enigma Variations, the Cello Concerto and the symphonies
• Ralph Vaughan WilliamsThe Tallis Fantasia, the Lark and the symphonies
• The choral yearsHuddersfield Choral Society and the big British choral works