Concert By Candlelight: Apollo5 At The Harrogate Music Festival

Thursday’s Concert by Candlelight at Harrogate’s St Wilfrid’s Church was the latest in a long-running series of performances given by nationally and internationally renowned choirs as part of the Music Festival’s summer programme. The event is now an institution, a continuum of astonishingly high quality set against the backdrop of a fine, spacious place of worship, and rewarded by fabulous acoustics.

And we were given an illustration of the sonic efficacy of the building’s architecture when Bass, Augustus Perkins Ray, informed us that Apollo5 were going to commence what proved to be an eclectic programme at one and two removes, both before and behind the altar. The placing was perfect: the opening set featured one of the most resonant pieces of the evening, a medieval conductus re-addressed by French composer Pérotin. The Beata Viscera unfolded behind the rood screen, bringing a transcending melodic simplicity to focused reflection. Followed by renditions of William Byrd’s motets, Vigilate and Beata Viscera, the choir’s effortless handling of complex vocal parts claimed the vaulted space beyond the altar, and yielded the illusion of sacred presence. The detaching of audience from the choral source is an immensely effective device, no more so than in Byrd’s Agnus Dei from the Mass for Five Voices, where ravelled polyphonies untangled to create a charged invocation.

Returning to the Nave, Apollo5 opened a modern set of sacred songs with James Macmillan’s renowned O Radiant Dawn, an antiphon of unusual power whose lines build in waves towards final resolution, and Ola Gjeilo’s Uba Caritas. Loosely influenced by Duruflé’s a cappella chant of 1960, Gjeilo’s much-performed 2018 version was given real hypnotic energy in the choir’s repeated phrasing and glorious concluding ‘Amen’. The delightfully concise Dieu! Qu’il La Fait Bon Regarder of Debussy was followed by Eric Whitacre’s This Marriage, whose recognisable hybrid of Rumi’s Eastern mysticism and Western vocal traditions was rendered with nuanced, harmonic brio by the choir, before a genuinely moving performance of Paul Smith’s Lost Innocence, sung with pristine, directed clarity, especially in the higher ranges.

It is a tribute to Apollo5’s tightness and collective endeavour that each of the five voices sustains at a high level of abstraction, whilst thriving in authoritative isolation. The received effect is multi-layered, harmonious without the slightest concession to quality, and the rapt listener would be hard put to find fault. Radical changes of tack presented no difficulty for such an accomplished choir, not least after the interval, where the programme veered effortlessly into ancient Celtic, hymnal, unashamedly romantic and finally, modern popular.

The rich tapestry of Am Gaeth I Muir, by contemporary Dublin-born composer, Michael McGlynn, whose incantatory qualities are enhanced by suggestion in the difficult linguistic registers of old Irish, was superbly counterpointed by McGlynn’s gorgeous hymn to the Virgin, O Pia Virgo. Here, a complex piece of tone and key change was anchored by the gravid power of Perkins Ray’s Bass, whilst the gorgeous interchange of the tenors and high-flying sopranos in The Last Rose of Summer was a perfect representation of the poetic text the song illuminates. The traditional American folk hymn, The Wayfaring Stranger, needed little introduction to those of us exposed to a certain scene in the film 1917, and its mournful sense of yearning was reproduced to moving effect by the choir, especially in the cut-crystal diction and clear emotional investment of the two sopranos, Clare Stewart and Penelope Appleyard.

Lest the audience should be left bereft, the evening’s finale brought us right up to date with a selection of modern popular pieces, whose brilliant reinvention would soften the hardest heart. Elton John’s hardy perennial Your Song was given sterling ensemble treatment in an arrangement by Matt Greenwood, particularly in the lovely, mellifluous and complementary tenor voices of Oscar Golden-Lee and Oli Martin-Smith. And Martin-Smith, by his own admission a pop-devotee in a choir of diverse personal tastes, up to and including Techno, came wonderfully to the fore with a slow-tempo version of Vince Clark’s Only You. Leading the harmonic line with great skill against the group’s a capella backdrop, this was a joyously inclusive way to conclude an evening’s entertainment.

Aside from embodying an appreciation of artfully performed choral music, the fulsome and sustained applause at the end was a timely reminder of just how much audiences value Concert by Candlelight’s annual gift. Long may it reign!


Apollo5 appeared at St Wilfrid's Church, Harrogate on Thursday, 11th July, as part of the Harrogate Festival.

The choir:

Clare Stewart - Soprano; Penelope Appleyard - Soprano;
Oscar Golden-Lee - Tenor; Oli Martin-Smith - Tenor; Augustus Perkins Ray - Bass.