THE RENOWNED Levens Choir is celebrating the centenary of an epoch-making year with their upcoming performance at the Parish Church of St George in Kendal.

The concert, on Saturday, July 2, will also be part of the 150th-anniversary celebrations of legendary composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, for which the choir will perform one of his works.

A spokesperson for Levens Choir said:

"1922, a momentous year in the worlds of music and literature, and the theme underlying the works to be sung, and spoken, at Levens Choir’s forthcoming concert on July 2 at the Parish Church of St George in Kendal, under the baton of music director Gawain Glenton.

"December 1922 saw the first performance of the Mass in G Minor by Ralph Vaughan Williams, an intriguing and beautiful mix of 20th-century harmony with the English choral tradition of composers such as William Byrd.

"Its place in this programme comes in a year that celebrates the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth (with upcoming Cumbria Festival Chorus and Lake District Music Festival concerts further marking the occasion locally).

"In Switzerland, composer Frank Martin was starting work on his own Mass for Double Choir. 

"Completed in 1926, this extraordinarily lovely piece was felt by Martin to be such a personal and intimate expression of his religious faith that he only finally allowed it to be performed in 1963. 

"Also on the programme is the short piece Nunc Dimittis, by Gustav Holst, to whom Vaughan Williams dedicated his mass, and the world premiere of a setting of Dover Beach written by local composer Adrian Self to celebrate Ian Jones’s directorship of Levens Choir.

"The choral works will be interspersed with readings from literature of the time, where ground was also being broken. 

"In fact, following the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in February and T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland in December, the American writer Willa Cather described 1922 as 'the year the world broke in two'."

The concert '1922' by Levens Choir will begin at the Parish Church of St George in Kendal at 7.30 p.m on July 2.

Tickets are £14, free for children and full-time students, and are available at www.levenschoir.net, from choir members or at the door.