YOU wait ages for a musical anniversary, then three come along at once. This year has brought us the 150th anniversary of Holst’s birth, the centenary of Fauré’s death, and Ronald Corp’s 40 years as Highgate Choral Society’s (HCS’s) Musical Director, all celebrated in a concert at the Cadogan Hall, in London, by the combined choirs of the Society and the London Chorus under the baton of Corp himself.

After an elegant and cheerful account of Holst’s A Somerset Rhapsody from the New London Orchestra, which Corp founded in 1988, we heard the première of his Phoenix from the Ashes — a cantata for suffering children. Written in memory of an HCS member who suffered under the Swiss Verdingkinder system (of indentured child labour), in collaboration with the poet and author Diana Jones, it juxtaposes poems by Rudyard Kipling, Louis MacNeice, Emily Dickinson, Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, and Jones herself, and purely as literature the effect is haunting.

Corp displays his usual skill with text and orchestration, the fruit of many years’ composing for choirs: he knows when to dwell on a word or phrase, but otherwise moves swiftly, keeping the poetry’s narrative flow. The orchestration is varied, with skilful use of woodwind soloists, but never overpowers the singers. There are many treasurable moments here: MacNeice’s “I am not yet born”, running through split into five parts, with its shifting string rhythms; Roderick Williams’s baritone solo; then the choir’s whispering and wordless humming; the tonal brass opening to Kipling’s “Time shall not mend”, replete with melancholy semitones; and the heart-wrenching unaccompanied soprano and oboe of Jones’s “A child has no voice”.

Corp, an Anglican priest, says: “It’s important to stress that the final section of my cantata (Jones’s ‘I am weak as water’) is a statement of triumph over adversity. I hope the final line, ‘my life’s my own’, truly represents the phoenix which has risen from the ashes.”

Faure’s Requiem sustains this note of hope, its gentle setting concentrating on the prospect of paradise rather than the terror of judgement; and the choir sang with hushed radiance, a band of faithful souls looking forward to a bright eternity. It is a paradox that a really effective pianissimo needs a lot of singers, and theirs was spine-tingling, the words clear as crystal as the orchestra floated underneath. Roderick Williams’s Libera Me and soprano Lucy Crowe’s Pie Jesu radiated a quiet confidence that their prayers for salvation would ultimately be fulfilled.