MALVERN Festival Chorus is set to present an evening of more contemporary sacred music, featuring two works from the early 20th century and one from the early 21st century.

A spokesman said: “The performance features two of the most popular British composers of this and the last century, Howard Goodall and Ralph Vaughan Williams, together with the renowned Czech composer, Leos Janacek.

“In the atmospheric setting of Malvern’s beautiful Priory, the programme explores the theme of darkness and light through the works of these three very different artists.”

The concert, on March 16, at 7.30pm, will include Howard Goodall’s ‘Eternal Light’; Leos Janacek’s ‘Otcenas’, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, ‘Five Mystical Songs’.

The stirring music of Vaughan Williams is sure to seem quite at home in Malvern Priory, not least because the composer is known to have corresponded with Louis Hamand, who was organist at the Priory for 35 years.

In one surviving letter, dated July 1925, Vaughan Williams misspells Hamand’s name as Hammond but gives him sound technical advice concerning the performance of the composer’s ‘Fantasia on Christmas Carols’.

He might have got Hamand’s name wrong, indicating perhaps that the men were professional acquaintances but not close friends, at least in 1925. But it would be an error to suppose that Vaughan Williams was a stranger to the Malvern area.

In fact, he and fellow composer Gustav Holst, best known today for the rousing suite, ‘The Planets’, enjoyed at least one walking holiday together in the Malvern Hills, in the company of another composer, W.G. Whittaker

The opportunity for a visit to the Malvern Hills was during the 1921 Three Choirs Festival, in Hereford, attended by both Vaughan Williams and Holst.

Black and white photographs still exist in a British Library archive, in the public domain. The catalogue explains how they were taken by Whittaker and show Vaughan Williams and Holst on the Malvern Hills.

As there are still larks ascending on the Malvern Hills, it would be tempting to suggest that Vaughan Williams drew inspiration from the hills for perhaps his finest work, The Lark Ascending. But as he started to write this particular piece in 1914, well before the walking holiday, that seems a stretch too far, to say the least.

In fact, according to an article for Classic FM, The Lark Ascending was composed when Vaughan Williams in Margate and lamented how troops were leaving England’s shores only to be slaughtered on the Western Front. This work is a lament and an elegy, then, rather that a celebration of the British landscape.

But what about that other composer far more closely associated with the Malvern Hills, Sir Edward Elgar? Did he and Vaughan Williams actually get on, despite being rivals?

It seems they did, with Elgar insisting that Vaughan Williams should address him not as Sir Edward but simply as “Teddie”.