MEMORIAL events for the centenary of the Armistice continue apace. The Micklegates, conducted by Nicholas Carter, called their programme Lights Out, after the poem by Edward Thomas, which formed the centrepiece of David Bednall’s Three Songs of Remembrance.

Sustaining their well-earned reputation for adventurous programming, the Micklegates then launched into three songs by the American composer Frank Ferko, before three Renaissance motets, returning to 20th century Britain after the interval.

The first two Bednall settings were melancholy, not to say one-paced, but his treatment of Charlotte Mew’s May, 1915 was on a different plane, as composer – and choir – gave beautiful treatment to its repeated opening line, "Let us remember Spring will come again".

Ferko’s Trois Chansons de Guerre, to poems by Apollinaire, found diverting colours amongst the essentially nasty business of war. Thereafter it was good to dig into some meaty counterpoint, with Weelkes’s only motet not in English, Laboravi in Gemitu Meo, contrasted with Rogier’s setting of those words. Here, regrettably, one must declare a victory on points for the Flemish composer, his swirling lines outdoing Weelkes’s more staid approach. Certainly the Micklegates seemed to feel so.

Two of Parry’s Songs of Farewell (1916) were confidently projected, with delectable final cadences. Contrasting settings of Donne’s prayer Bring Us, O Lord God, by William Harris and James MacMillan, were joyously expectant, though the latter’s closing bars were less convincing. But the fanfares of Vaughan Williams’s Valiant-for-Truth neatly distilled the evening’s message.