REVIEW Passion and Protest Kidderminster Choral Society Kidderminster Town Hall

THE title of the concert, Passion and Protest, expressed a common theme and all three pieces cried out powerfully and movingly against state violence and oppression.

Although the cultural and historical standpoints are quite different, these three works stressed the suffering brought to ordinary people.

It produced a thrilling concert of 20th century classical music from the Choral Society, featuring a fine quartet of guest soloists in Rebecca Goulden (soprano), Lucinda Stuart-Grant (mezzo-soprano), Philip Sheffield (tenor) and Adrian Clarke (baritone), and with accompaniment from Marcus Huxley (organ) and The Elgar Sinfonia.

With Geoffrey Weaver as the conductor, the evening began with Psalmus Hungaricus by Zoltán Kodály, composed in 1923 when Hungary was being dismembered as a country according to treaties implemented after the First World War. The music is quite exotic, and a powerful expression of Hungarian identity.

Then came the popular orchestral work Finlandia by Jean Sibelius, written in 1899 when Finland was a duchy in the Russian empire, gradually losing its autonomy, with writers and artists subject to ever-increasing censorship. The central melody is well-known to us as the hymn tune Be still my soul. After the interval came A Child of our Time by Michael Tippett, composed in 1940.

The libretto is based on the true story of a young Polish Jew who assassinated a German diplomat in Paris in 1938, in response to Nazi persecution of the Jews in his homeland. This unleashed wholesale brutality against the Jews in occupied Europe, which would lead to the Second World War and the Holocaust.

The arias and choruses are interspersed with well known black American spirituals, commenting more widely on the human condition, culminating in the spiritual Deep River, which expresses a longing for homecoming, peace and reconciliation, to which all humanity can aspire.

The society’s next engagement will be on Saturday, July 14 in the town hall, with a performance of music written for royal occasions over the past 400 years, to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.