On 25 May Bray Choral Society celebrated their 40th anniversary with the premiere of The Creation Song of the Choir of Light by Howard Goodall, a 7 ½ -minute work for choir and orchestra to a specially-created text by poet and farmer Keith Brennan. The performance was conducted by Frank Kelly, the choir’s music director, and will receive its Latvian premiere in Riga from conductor and choir on 13 June. The Creation Song of the Choir of Light was commissioned by Bray Choral Society to mark their 40th year and in recognition of their Founder and Music Director, Mr Frank Kelly.
The piece is scored for SATB chorus and small orchestra. Brennan described his meeting with Goodall on his “unkempt, half-wild” farm outside Roscommon on RTE. "The piece begins on a morning on the farm. The ragged thorn hedges. The curl of wind through trees. The rising tide of birdsong that breaks over the fields. I talk to Howard. Of pine martins. Sapphire-eyed sparrowhawks. Of farmer friends in love with cuckoos and swallows.” Read about their collaboration here.
Brennan’s text describes, in both Gaelic and English, flora and fauna coming to life - what Brennan calls “The furious greening that grips the spring world” – before the observers are transfigured themselves by their song of praise to creation. “Wherever we share with one another the experience of beautiful things, the divides are blurred,” Brennan noted, “the gap between people close and is bridged. We are pulled a little closer in the sharing. And in the sharing we build community.” The piece concludes with a radiant choral-orchestral climax, as the choir sings “I’m in the light, the light is in me.”
In 2025 Frank Kelly conducted Goodall’s celebrated Eternal Light: A Requiem with Bray Choral Society – a work that has been performed over 700 times internationally by amateurs and professionals alike since its 2008 debut. In 2019 he conducted the Irish premiere of Goodall’s Invictus: A Passion, a 21st-century reimagining of the Passion story drawing on female poets writing between the 17th and 20th centuries, with both Wicklow and Bray Choral societies .
May also saw the premiere of a new arrangement of Goodall’s I believe in the sun from ORA Singers and Suzi Digby. The 4-minute work was originally commissioned by the BBC in 2001 for the inaugural Holocaust Memorial Day, where its first version – for children’s voices, SATB chorus, and piano/keyboard – was conducted by Digby at Westminster Central Hall. The new arrangement is for unaccompanied double SATB choir and was performed at the Town Church in St. Helier, Jersey, on 16 May. Goodall sets graffiti found on the wall of a cell in Cologne during the Second World War, where Jews had been hiding before being transported to a concentration camp in 1941.