Hereford's new organist and master of choristers, Geraint Bowen, is artistic director of this year's Three Choirs Festival, his inaugural programme a lively mix of the traditional and the challenging. The fervour of Hubert Parry's anthem I was Glad was impressive, with the cathedral's boy choristers adding a clean edge to the muscular, well-schooled sound of the festival chorus.
Parry composed his anthem for the crowning of Edward VII at Westminster Abbey; Mozart's Mass in C, K317 (known as the Coronation Mass) was written 12 years earlier for Salzburg's Archbishop Colloredo. The imperious disdain with which the 23-year-old Mozart treated his employer's attempts to cramp his style was reflected in the exuberantly defiant spirit Bowen brought to the fast movements. His chorus was suitably resplendent even if the soloists - soprano Ruth Holton, countertenor William Towers, tenor James Oxley and baritone Jeremy Huw Williams - were somewhat restrained.
William Mathias's extended cantata, This Worlde's Joie, was written in 1974. Using medieval poems and songs, it celebrates the four seasons and the lifespan of man. Mathias's word setting is highly effective, the occasional blossoming of key words all the more vivid for being sparingly used.
The music balances simple, sometimes deliberately simplistic, choral writing with intricate instrumental textures, the sound of boys' voices punctuating proceedings with welcome austerity and the internal structure of the four sections becoming more complex in parallel with the thorny maze of life emotional and philosophical questions.
Bowen was occasionally a little heavy-handed with his forces - the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in strong form - but it was his underlining of the work's natural vigour and colour that made this performance so vibrant.
Jeremy Huw Williams was easily the best of the three soloists, delivering the line, "Of this worlde's joie, how it cometh to nought", most potently. Yet that dynamic force was dissipated abruptly when baritone and chorus then spoke rather than sung the poem's despairing climactic stanza. Not even the glorious conviction of the final chorus heralding a joyous new spring could quite make up for that.
