Birmingham Festival Choral Society at Adrian Boult Hall

Jun 30 2008 By David Hart

As the choral core of the old Triennial Musical Festivals, and in later incarnations, Birmingham Festival Choral Society has seen some notable firsts.

The premières of Mendelssohn's Elijah and Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius are now the stuff of history.

In more recent times, under Jeremy Patterson's long and distinguished stewardship, new works by composers as diverse as John Joubert, Elis Pehkonen and Bob Chilcott are still fondly remembered.

Saturday's concert, however, which featured Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo as the main item, will be one to forget if not forgive. Originally written for children (it should never have been let out of school) this ragbag collection of banal songs and humourless ditties by Joseph Horovitz and Michael Flanders is hardly the sort of thing to foist on a respectable choral society.

Patrick Larley - misguided to say the least - and BFCS gave it their best shot, but words were virtually non-existent, the jazz-trio accompaniment of piano (Kevin Gill), bass and drums lifeless, and baritone soloist Adrian Blakeley's classically trained delivery ill-suited to the style. Elsewhere, things were much better. Part-songs by Finzi, Elgar and Larley himself were nicely shaped and enunciated, if rather the same musically; and there was an unfortunate loss of pitch in Patrick Hadley's anthem My Beloved Spake.

Britten's Choral Dances from Gloriana provided the proof that this is the sort of music BFCS members would rather spend their time on.

In terms of lustre and vibrancy (replicated later in a Larley arrangement of Somewhere Over The Rainbow) their singing here outshone everything else on the programme, especially Larley's reedy tenor solos linking each song.