Posted on: 12th March 2025

IT is always a treat to be able to hear a performance by the Leeds Guild of Singers in the generous acoustic of St Margaret’s Ilkley and last Saturday’s concert was no exception.

The Guild, under its musical director, Benjamin Kirk, presented a diverse selection of music, largely for double choir, from across the 20th century and into the 21st. The singers were on excellent form - well-rehearsed, with excellent blend and clear pronunciation. No matter how dense the texture, each individual part (and there were more than ten of them in places!) carried an appropriate weight, with individual solos emerging naturally.

The concert started with Bairstow’s setting of a metrical version of the Lord’s prayer – Our Father in the heavens – containing some harmonic surprises. The complexity of this setting contrasted well with the simplicity of Vaughan Williams’ setting of John Skelton’s Prayer to the Father of heaven and with the ecstatic intensity of the fourth of Knut Nystedt’s Prayers of Kierkegaard. The climax of this half came with the performance of Whitacre’s Her sacred spirit soars. The text appears to be a tribute to the Oriana madrigals of the early seventeenth century but Whitacre sets this as a giant canon with the two choirs displaced by four beats and further internal canons. Nothing could be less madrigalian but, as always with Whitacre, it is the magic of the sound world he creates that never ceases to draw one in!

Read the full review here.