By Clare Stevens

Some of the best professional chamber choirs in the world visit the Three Choirs Festival every year, but it’s worth remembering that we have a very skilled group of professional singers right here on our doorstep. The lay clerks of Hereford Cathedral are the men who sing the alto, tenor and bass parts in the cathedral choir along with the choristers (who sing the soprano or treble parts); some services are sung by the men’s voices alone. Most have music degrees and all have a great deal of expertise in singing, but they have other jobs as well, working as teachers, in retail, in the cathedral’s administrative offices, or in other professions when not rehearsing or performing with the choir. Two are actually choral scholars rather than lay clerks, spending a year living and working in Hereford before going on to study elsewhere.

Their late night concert is always a highlight of the Three Choirs Festival, and this year was no exception. It began in serious mood, with several short pieces of sacred music, such as the lay clerks would normally sing in the cathedral choir stalls. These included four short prayers attributed to St Francis of Assisi, set to music by Francis Poulenc, which really showed off the group’s balance, blend and immaculate tuning.

The remainder of the programme, however, was more light-hearted, featuring secular music in a variety of styles, giving plenty of opportunities for individual voices to shine and for all the singers to display their musical versatility.

Highlights included an arrangement of the overture to Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville, in which the voices mimicked different orchestral instruments (the audience particularly enjoyed their ‘diddly-doo’, ‘broom broom’ and ‘tiddley-pom’ interjections). An arrangement of the Scottish folksong ‘Loch Lomond’ called for a bagpipe effect and ‘Singing in the Rain’ introduced not only a parade of umbrellas but some off-stage tap-dancing.

The King’s Singers’ published arrangements work very well for this group and several were included in the programme, but one or two of the lay clerks had done their own versions of popular songs. Bass Pete Challenger arranged the Beatles’ ‘Hello, Goodbye’ to mark his dad Stephen’s 50 years of singing in church choirs – Stephen, a tenor, is the cathedral’s senior lay clerk; and alto Sam’s arrangement of Queen’s ‘Don’t stop me now’ proved hugely popular with the audience.

In a very different style was former lay clerk Tim Symons’s arrangement of the Irish folksong ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’, which gave the performers the chance to demonstrate some exquisitely beautiful singing. As did the last song in this hugely entertaining programme: ‘Golden Slumbers’.