Proms 63-65, Choral Day review - from Harris to Handel/Mozart via Alabama, with love

The Proms’ Indian summer of big visiting orchestras is over – and what a parade it’s been – but renewal hit on the last Saturday before the Last Night with a rainbow of choral concerts, from the 26 voices of The Sixteen (yes, counter-intuitive, I know) and the 33 of the Jason Max Ferdinand Singers to 250 from six choirs as crisp as a small ensemble under John Butt in a Messiah with a difference.

Parry’s “I Was Glad” made sense as the beginning of the end, in a good way (though with some rather bizarre organ stops pulled out by Simon Johnson). It was always the choice for my church choir’s last evensong on summer cathedral courses, and two other nostalgic favourites featured in The Sixteen’s programme of great British choral music (★★★★). Ireland’s “Greater Love” is stacked with ideas beautifully articulated, and text-clear, by Harry Christophers’ choristers, but it was the double-choir ecstasy of Harris’s “Faire is the Heaven” which went deepest, phrasing finely guided by Christophers and giddying key-changes fluently negotiated. Stanford motets and partsongs provided a kind of inner symmetry, Balfour Gardiner's "Evening Hymn" added choral sensuousness, and only Elgar's "Give unto the Lord" struck as a bit below par, inventionwise. But that was redeemed by the glorious encore, "There is a country" from Parry's Songs of Farewell.

The long-term absence of the Afro-Caribbean element in the purist English choral tradition – rooted in Oxbridge selectivity, it seems – found its compensation in the visit of the dazzlingly professional Jason Max Ferdinand Singers and their eponymous composer-conductor (★★★★★). Chris Martin from Coldplay gave them $20,000 to help fund their trip – note that there have been no American orchestras this year, and that makes sense given air miles and expense – while another fan, the phenomenally versatile Jacob Collier, called the original Aeolian Singers, now in the core of this group, "the finest choir on the face of the earth". Judge for yourself, if you weren't there – and circumstances meant I had to hear Prom 64 on the radio, something I deeply regret now – from the "Goodbye" blaze at the end of Collier's "World, O World", the big closing number, from 1hr49m09s (listen here). His point holds good for this expanded set-up, founded only three years ago under conditions still affected by lockdown (Collier pictured below getting the audience to sing, with Ferdinand and the choir looking on).

Like all great artists responsive to the hallowed magic of the Albert Hall, the JMFS gave us perfect pianissimos, the core here perhaps being Norman Luboff's "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen". In the one-hour-50-minute range, some numbers were bound to work better than others: James Mulholland's Keramos felt a bit inflated, Consummate Alabama-based pianist John Stoddard's piano fantasia with chorus around "Soon I Will Be Done" hovered on the cusp of absurdity (maybe you had to be there), but his arrangement of Erroll Gardner's "Misty" offered more hold-your-breath beauty, spotlighting counter-tenor from the choir Thomas Allen, winner of the 2021 Sarah Vaughan International Jazz Vocal Competition, and Stoddard's jazz filigree for Ferdinand's unashamedly sentimental "Safe in His Arms" was as fine as the hushed choral singing. Other JMFS soloists covered themselves in glory, a distinguished UK-based string quintet added lustre and there was a fabulous star turn from Cedric Dent, baritone of TAKE 6 and now also of the JMFS, in his piano homage to "Precious Lord". Dent resonantly led the way in his arrangement of "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands", complete with neat reference to Handel's "Hallelujah" Chorus.

Nothing could quite have prepared us for how it sounded in the full Messiah that evening, all five choirs, four soloists and those audience members who felt like it raising the roof (★★★★★). But this wasn't a simple case of returning to a large-scale performance of the sort the Albert Hall has witnessed in the past. When Mozart reverently arranged his beloved Handel for Gottfried von Swieten's private concerts in Vienna, he wouldn't have envisaged this. But the adornments of the greatest composer for woodwind (by 1789. at any rate) gave one source of pleasure last night out of many as John Butt proved master not only of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and four British soloists we all hugely admire (Nardus Williams and Helen Charlston pictured below) but also choral forces of a size he's rarely encountered. Only the opening Symphony gave cause for concern: was there to be the kind of unexpected ponderousness which marred Butt's Bach B minor Mass with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, a one-off blip. But from the moment that the engaging Benjamin Hulett took the stage – appropriate term for a dramatic approach – and Mozart's bucolic woodwind enhanced his lovely "Every Valley" right through to the end, vivacity took off and never deserted the performance. The choirs were fully focused and word-clear at every point: it seemed, though I couldn't be sure, that the Philharmonia Chorus were the main participants, reliable in fugal complexities and fast runs, while the others behind them – the non-auditioning Bath Minerva Chorus, The Fourth Choir representing London's LGBTQ+ community, the returning JMFS, and the young choristers of the London Youth Chamber Choir and Voices of the River's Edge, bravissimi tutti – reinforced bigger moments like "Wonderful, Counsellor" in "For unto us a child is born" (Mozart's timpani added splendour here, too).

It's getting hard to imagine Bach Passions and Messiah without the essential humanity of Helen Charlston at the expressive heart of all three works (unless it be even younger Hugh Cutting, another voice in a million). "He was despised" proved as nuanced and moving as her interpretation under very different circumstances (26 musicians in the Wigmore Hall, led by Peter Whelan and his Irish Baroque Orchestra, not far short of Handel's original ensemble in Dublin's Fishamble Street Hall. I foreswore another Messiah in the foreseeable future after that, but the Mozart version let me off the hook). Nardus Williams' "He shall feed his flock" offered stillness of a different, equally beautiful sort. In the swings and roundabouts of Mozart's solo re-allocations, no-one really lost out. Hulett could not have delivered "Rejoice greatly" more stylishly, and bass Ashley Riches got to sign in early, aria-wise, with Mozart's warmly-lined version of "But who may abide".

One thing we may have missed in Mozart's version – the clarion call of valveless trumpets – raised a bit of a laugh as horns shared with conventional trumpet the rejoinders to the bass's big Part Three solo, and the woodwind chuggings alongside the chorus in "All we like sheep" provided pretty amusement, needed after the high intensity of the passion numbers. I was at a slight disadvantage in being furthest from soprano and mezzo – some overhearing necessary, though all the glints in Williams' voice and the essential hue of Charlston's came across – as radio listeners won't be, but it's always heartening to see collegial support such as I saw from the two sitting and witnessing others' performances. There had never been any doubt that these four, our finest, would deliver, but I'd not reckoned with the sheer joy of the overall impact. As always with a great performance, the genius of Handel in turning out not one single dud number makes you realise why this is the most popular oratorio of all time.

• Listen to Prom 63, Prom 64 and Prom 65 on BBC Sounds
• BBC Proms 2024 runs until 14 September
• More Proms reviews on theartsdesk