Composers revitalising the choral repertoire today are doing as much for choristers themselves as for the audiences who listen to the works.

This was evident from GBS’s Music For A Summer’s Evening, a miscellany of choral pieces, poetry readings and songs, with conductor Roger Langford explaining how accessible is the new material by Americans Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen, and Welshman Paul Mealor.

All three re-define the allotting of musical roles within the traditional four-block choir structure, but it was Whitacre’s setting of Ted Esch’s poem Lux Aurumque which most transcended the mechanics that give rise to whatever luminosity the works finally possess.

Intricacy alone is the challenge in Lauridsen’s Ubi Caritas et Amor, a setting of an antiphon for Maundy Thursday. The unaccompanied choir rose to it splendidly in tackling the relentless contrapuntal elaboration of that opening plainchant, as it did in settings of the same words by Mealor and Duruflé under Mr Langford’s animated direction.

But it was vocal agility in six songs including Tom Lehrer’s risqué The Vatican Rag (well, risqué in proximity to a religious house) which then showed off the conductor’s handsome baritone voice to advantage. He was accompanied at the keyboard by Vaughan Bennett, who had his solo spot with a quirky arrangement of the Ellingtonian Caravan by Juan Tizol, and a piece by Coleridge Taylor. Readings were by Beth Blunt, Mary Williams, Liz O’Brien (a Michael Head song, too, from her) and a refreshingly non-sentimental one of Auden’s Funeral Blues by David Filsell. Six of the ladies stepped up for Simon Lindley’s Ave Maria and Arvo Part’s unlikely setting of Biblical genealogy, Which Was the Son Of…proved to be lengthy intricacy taken by the choir in its stride.