JONATHAN Rathbone’s Under The Shadow Of His Wing receives its northern premiere at St Olave’s Church, Marygate, York, on Saturday under the baton of York Minster’s assistant director of music, Benjamin Morris.

Performed at 7.30pm by the Chapter House Choir, Rathbone's work is conceived as "a live aural experience – something between a concert and a service".

Written for a large acoustic, it will utilise several different areas of St Olave’s Church, to “wrap the audience in the acoustic experience and embrace the oncoming night time”.

Consisting of 16 individual movements, linked together thematically via the use of plainsong with an overarching theme of a musical journey from darkness to light, the work will be performed in semi-darkness.

The choir starts and finishes at the back in the gloom and during the performance gradually moves all around the church, enveloping the audience with music that swirls all around them. The piece has been written to incorporate the inevitable time lag between distant choirs. Words are taken from the services of Compline and Evensong and other poems and hymns connected with nighttime and sleep.

Rathbone's work was premiered by the Vasari Singers to a rapturous response at St Alban’s Church, Holborn, London, in October 2014.

Now, the Chapter House Choir is delighted to be welcoming Rathbone, former musical director of the Swingle Singers, to York this weekend. "What I’d really, really like is for the audience to just sit there and listen and let it envelop them" he says. "It’s somewhere between a service and a concert.

"It is a concert, obviously, it’s been written as a concert, but to me it’s like an act of worship as well. It takes you on a journey and should set you up for night time. I would describe [the harmony] as lush...I want people to close their eyes and just listen and be swept up with it."

After a triumphant first year as the Chapter House Choir’s musical director, up-and-coming organist and conductor Benjamin Morris returns to the podium for Saturday's performance.

Tickets are on sale on 01904 623 568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk.

YORK Symphony Orchestra's spring concert takes place at at the Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York, on Saturday at 7.30pm.

"We'll be playing Neilsen’s Helios Overture and Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2, and we’re also really excited to be playing Bruch’s wonderful Violin Concerto No.1 with Fenella Humphreys as the soloist," says YSO chairman Lily Rowntree.

"It’s our second concert with our new conductor, Edward Venn, who has been doing a great job and we’re really pleased that our previous conductor, Alasdair Jamieson, is now the president of the orchestra. Tickets can be booked at yso.org.uk/store/.

Charles Hutchinson