PROFICIENT members of a St Albans choir will demonstrate their ability in three other languages as well as English at their concert in St Albans Abbey on Saturday.

St Albans Bach Choir’s concert entitled From Bruckner to Bernstein will feature an evening of varied music in which the choir will sing in Latin, Czech and Hebrew together with their native tongue.

The concert will feature meditative fervour in Bruckner’s motets Locus Iste and Christus Factus Est set off by the English grandeur in Parry’s Milton setting Blest Pair of Sirens and Elgar’s Give Unto the Lord.

Janacek’s Otcenas, a setting of the Lord’s prayer, brings a note of Eastern European passion to the evening with a starring role for leading harp soloist Hugh Webb.

Two very different 20th-Century masterpieces, Britten’s quirky and original Rejoice in the Lamb and Bernstein’s moving Chichester Psalms round off the evening which gets underway at 7.30pm.

Music director Andrew Lucas said: “It is good for us to have the opportunity to sing different music from our usual repertoire which is of the highest quality, all of which gains by the richer sonority of a large chorus.”

At the concert the choir will be joined by young soprano Rosie Hulbert, a former member of the Abbey Girls’ Choir, counter-tenor Alexander L’Estrange, a well-known singer and composer who lives in Wheathampstead, Ronan Busfield, a tenor lay-clerk at St George’s Windsor who will be heard at this summer’s proms, percussion from Sinfonia Verdi and organist Tom Winpenny, assistant master of music at the Abbey.

Tickets are �24, �18 and �13 reserved and �8 unreserved, available from the Abbey Information Desk or by post with an sae from the ticket secretary, 8 Bridle Close, St Albans AL3 5HX, telephone 01727 853328.