Come the New Year, Monday nights at the United Reformed Church (URC), Quay Street, Halesworth, will resound to happy singing and laughter as the Halesworth Festival Voices get back to rehearsing for their next concert, given this time at the URC on Saturday 30th January 2010 at 7.30 pm.

The Voices begin the new decade with a programme of light-hearted pieces by English composers. The music of Ralph Vaughan Williams occupies the first half. In Windsor Forest is a cantata adapted from his opera, Sir John In Love, based on Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. The plot involves pairs of lovers, secret love-letters, fat men hiding in laundry baskets, fairies, flirtations and a happy ending.

The tone of the second half is set with a work by another national treasure, Edward Elgar, whose As Torrents In Summer hints at bad weather to come.

And indeed it does in a thought-provoking song by a far lesser known composer. Standing In The Rain, by Sidney Carter, (best known for his words to The Lord Of The Dance) asks us to consider a modern view of the ‘no room at the inn’ story.

After that, the deluge. Captain Noah And His Floating Zoo is a cantata in popular style with words by Michael Flanders and music by Joseph Horovitz. They were attracted to the story because it offered such a splendid, dramatic shape for setting to music as a group of songs, while following the Old Testament very closely. That’s not to say that there won’t be any dramatic effects introduced by the Voices and the little band that accompanies the performance. But that would be telling.

This is only the fourth concert by Halesworth’s own choral group, and after sell-out performances of baroque, classical and modern music they have chosen to show yet another side to their versatility. Admission to this concert is by programme, £6.00, which you should buy in advance from Halesworth Bookshop – and don’t forget to bring it with you to URC on the night! Seating is unreserved, so arrive in good time to be sure of the front rows. There will be free soft drinks during the interval.

And what’s next? As a sneak preview of what lies ahead for the Voices this year, they plan to present a late-spring performance at St Mary’s Church to include music by Schubert and Mozart, and looking even further forward to the Arts Festival in October, they will follow last year’s capacity Haydn concert with a programme of music by Gabriel Faure.