THE Chapter House Choir is performing an evening of poignant music and readings to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War.

Included in the programme will be the world premiere of a piece by distinguished composer, Judith Bingham, commissioned by the choir.

In Arcadia, Judith uses a poem by Rimbaud, which describes finding the dead body of a soldier from the Franco-Prussian War or 1870, lying in a beautiful landscape. The music also incorporates a response to Rimbaud by contemporary poet Robin Leanse, in which the same landscape is peppered with the fallen of World War One.

The Chapter House Choir is committed to commissioning new music from contemporary composers and Arcadia by Bingham is the last of three pieces in the choir’s 2014 Year of Commissions.

The programme also includes another of the 2014 commissions – In Memoriam by Gabriel Jackson, which was commissioned in memory of soprano, Clare Latham, who sang with the choir.

This will be only the second performance of this piece; the first having taken place at a charitable concert in London with the Coro chamber choir, raising money for Macmillan and St. Leonard’s Hospice.

These new commissions will be performed alongside more traditional choral works, including Guest’s For the Fallen – composed for the annual Remembrance Day service in Westminster Abbey – as well as pieces by Gibbons, Elgar and Farrant. Howells’ Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing, is also featured – a moving response to the death of John F Kennedy in 1963.

The programme will also include readings of wartime letters between Vera Brittain and fiancé Roland Leighton, who died from wounds sustained in battle in December 1915, age 20, by children from St Peter’s School.

Leighton was a pupil at Uppingham School, where Stephen Williams – the Musical Director of the Chapter House Choir – is now Director of Music.

Stephen said: “The combination of these readings and the hauntingly beautiful remembrance music of composers including Bingham, Howells and Elgar reminds us of the deep personal devastation experienced by the family and friends of all those who were lost in the First World War.

“It also reminds us of the importance of our nation’s collective Remembrance ceremonies and the extraordinary way in which they are still imprinted on our lives in 2014.”

The concert takes place on Saturday, November 8, at 7.30pm, in St Olave’s Church, York. Tickets are £15 for adults, £13.50 concessions and £5 for under 19s and are available from the box office in York Minster, by phoning 01904 557208 or online at yorkminster.org

Tickets also available at the door.