POPULAR chamber choir, the Hepton Singers, will be in Huddersfield next weekend with an exciting programme of music.

The Singers are a 35-strong choir who rehearse in Hebden Bridge, conducted by Alison West.

The choir will present a summer concert at Paddock Quaker Meeting House in Church Street, on June 29 at 2pm.

Entry is free but donations are requested for the Barmoor Renovation Project which the Singers are supporting.

Barmoor is a house on the edge of the North York Moors, run by the Quaker Trust and offering inexpensive self-catering accommodation for community groups and projects.

Next Saturday’s concert will offer a programme of powerful music. Its central element will be Kullervo’s Message, a dramatic and lively modern piece by the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis.

The piece, which was originally commissioned by the Hilliard Ensemble, describes an episode in the life of Kullervo, the only irredeemably tragic character in The Kalevala, a 19th century work of Finnish epic poetry compiled from Finnish and Karelian oral folklore and mythology.

The programme also includes English folk-song arrangements by Amy Bebbington and reworkings of Scottish folk songs by James MacMillan.

Alison West says: “The great majority of Tormis’s choral pieces are based on Estonian folk songs, so it was a logical step to include folk-song settings in our programme.”

The programme’s Scottish theme continues with Thea Musgrave’s Song Of The Burn and A Hoy Calendar by Sir Peter Maxwell-Davies, which describes a year on the Orkney island of Hoy.

Similarly, Sally Beamish’s Bird Year is a description of the four seasons, each represented by a particular bird.

The choir will also sing Howard Skempton’s settings of nature poems by Edward Thomas and settings of Elizabethan songs by Vaughan Williams