Through the Seasons in Song contains a mixture of sacred and secular pieces ranging through the centuries as well as the seasons of the year.

There is also a strong emphasis on the natural world, with songs that feature three different types of bird, along with a lamb, a dormouse and some rural scenes.

The earliest piece O Holy Spirit, Lord of Grace by Christopher Tye dates from Tudor times, and there will be two pieces from the early C17: There is a lady, a part-song by Thomas Ford, and In the Merry Spring, a dialogue between a hopeful shepherd and his hoity-toity lady love, by Thomas Ravenscroft.

The theme of springtime is picked up in Let us all go Maying by Robert Lucas De Pearsall, a C19 composer, who wrote several madrigals in the Elizabethan style. He spent much of the latter part of his life in Germany, and we shall also be singing the more solemn Purple Glow the Forest Mountains in which he set words by a German poet.

Two other composers contribute more than one piece to our selection: Sir William Sterndale Bennett, a generation younger, was active in many fields of music, beginning as a Cambridge chorister. He was famed as a pianist; as a conductor he brought Bach’s St Matthew Passion to England, and he was Professor of Music at Cambridge, and later Principal of the Royal Academy. We shall sing two of his anthems, both using words from St John’s Gospel: God is a Spirit and the longer O That I Knew, which precedes the words of the Gospel with an extract from the Book of Job; there is a distinct change of mood, and key, between the two sections.

Then Charles Wood, an Irish composer working in England in the late C19/early C20, contributes four pieces to our programme: two secular part-songs, the Lamb (words by William Blake) and the haunting, bleak and slightly eerie Widow Bird (words by Shelley); a short sacred piece (Jesu, the very thought is sweet) and a Latin Grace, Oculi Omnium, written as a canon with each part in turn singing the same sequence of notes at a different pitch.

We have two evocations of the countryside, first Chillingham by Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (contemporary with Wood, he too was active in many fields of English music, writing for Anglican services, but also secular pieces such as this memory of Northumberland). The second, a setting of the first part of Gray’s Elegy, is a particular favourite of the choir. It dates from the eighteenth century, and is thought to be by Dr William Hayes, Professor of Music at Oxford University.

Some years younger than Hayes, Dr Benjamin Cooke, organist of Westminster Abbey, also composed a number of secular pieces, including at least two about mice. We shall sing his Epitaph for a Dormouse, written, it is said, by a child, and drawing a very moral conclusion.

Turning from animals to birds, we have two songs by C19 composers: The Cuckoo by George W Martin is a short and cheery celebration of the cuckoo’s call, while the Address to the Woodlark, by William Jackson of Masham, an organist, conductor and choral master in Yorkshire, is a more serious piece on unrequited love, setting words by Robert Burns.

In acknowledgement of our lost concert programme of December 2010, which was cancelled owing to near-blizzard conditions, we have two Christmas pieces, each of which would have marked an anniversary had it been sung last year. The Stable Door, by C Armstrong Gibbs (died 1960), concentrates on the message of Christmas, while Slumber, My Little One is an adaptation of an Alsatian lullaby carol by Stanley Vann, former Master of Music at Peterborough Cathedral, who died in 2010 having just achieved his 100th birthday.