The Singing Will Never Be Done

The Elysian Singers commemorate the ending of the First World War by mixing choral and organ music from the period with 21st-century settings of the famous war poets. The backbone of the programme is provided by the six miraculous 'Songs of Farewell' by Hubert Parry, who died just a month before the Armistice.

Equally moving is John Duggan's 2008 work 'The Singing Will Never Be Done', a group of astonishingly assured settings of poems by Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and Ivor Gurney.

There are shorter works by Parry's great rival Charles Villiers Stanford, Gurney's close friend Herbert Howells, and the choir's patron Sir James MacMillan, as well as a recent setting by Owen Leech of (non-war) poems by Isaac Rosenberg, who died in the trenches alongside so many poets, composers and ordinary men.