Review

TITLE: Honley Male Voice Choir and Cory BandREVIEW: By Chris Robins

AT three hours duration this concert pushed Honley Male Voice Choir to their limits, and became more watchnight vigil than Christmas celebration for many in the audience who struggled with drooping eyelids.

Still, the Honley men – fewer in number than previous years and with a noticeably venerable average age – were generally crisp in ensemble and nimble in melody. They have the traditional West Yorkshire soft tone. By contrast, their guests the Cory Band have hard burnished tone. Hard tone always beats soft as a vehicle for expression and variation – perhaps this, plus their capacity to listen to each other, won the Corys their World Champions title this year for the fifth year running.

Despite the tonal incompatibility, the two groups worked well together under the baton of Alan Jenkins, taking charge at Honley once again after a couple of attempts at retirement. His own arrangement for band and choir of Sullivan’s The Lost Chord was clear and clever, without schmaltz and with a hint of Sullivan in madrigal mode. It was superbly delivered.

Under their Musical Director Robert Childs the Corys produced a couple of those jaw droppingly stunning theme and acrobatic variation solos, and their versions of Bernstein’s America and Somewhere were proof that hard tone facilitates subtleties soft tone cannot get near. Surprisingly, there was only a single number by that giant among band and choir composers, Goff Richards, who died in June and who had written much for both the Honley men and the Cory Band.