A festive fantasia - with bells on! REVIEW.

Byline: By WILLIAM MARSHALL

TITLE Ring Out, Wild Bells, Huddersfield Singers

VENUE St Paul's Hall

AMONG Christmas concerts locally you would be hard-pressed to find a more interesting and imaginative programme than this.

There were three substantial works - a mass based on traditional French Christmas songs by the baroque composer Charpentier; an unusual carol sequence, The Child for Today, from the contemporary composer Arthur Wills; and the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on Christmas Carols.

Amongst this substantial fare we had two sets of shorter pieces from the Clifton Village Handbell Ringers, highly skilled practitioners of an intriguing form of music making.

Their repertoire included, most impressively, a fine rendition of Ketelbey's extravagant In a Persian Market and a Japanese composition, Takeda Rhapsody, particularly suited to the ethereal sound of hand bells.

The concert was entitled Ring Out, Wild Bells - the name of the well-known poem by Tennyson. The Singers, conducted by Philip Honnor, began the concert with a full-blooded rendition of Percy Fletcher's setting of this text.

The first half ended with the Charpentier and, despite the laudable ambition, this was the least convincing choral performance of the night, with problems of coherence in the Credo in particular.

Far more impressive was the Arthur Wills suite.

The choir seemed more at home here and the powerful prelude and postlude were among many excellent contributions to the concert made by organist Tom Moore.

The concert concluded with the Vaughan Williams Fantasia, featuring sonorous cello from Will Mace and fine solo singing from baritone Robert O'Connell.

The Singers captured well the quintessential RVWblend of mysticism and exuberance that makes this work one of the very best of English Christmas compositions.