Dobrinka Tabakova’s new cantata Immortal Shakespeare takes the notion of Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man and creates a forty-minute arc of choral music to words from Hamlet, The Tempest and King John, culminating in a hushed setting of the obituary carved on Shakespeare’s monument in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon. So there was a special atmosphere about this world premiere, given by David Curtis and the Orchestra of the Swan as part of the Shakespeare 400 commemorations just metres from Will’s mortal remains in Holy Trinity itself.

It’s an attractive piece. Setting Shakespeare is never a straightforward undertaking for a composer, but the OOTS Chamber Choir sang with clarity and conviction, with Curtis and his orchestra bringing out Tabakova’s lush textures and instrumental flights of fantasy – a splash of vibraphone here, a harp ostinato there, and in the latter stages just a hint of the icy epilogue to Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony. It was enthusiastically received. Nice too to see the evening’s soloist Tamsin Waley-Cohen joining the orchestra for the various brief violin solos.

Earlier, Waley-Cohen had given a performance of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending that, between blissfully still and expressive opening and closing paragraphs, positively danced – the OOTS responding to her endless subtleties of tone with considerable finesse. The OOTS seems to thrive on the Holy Trinity acoustic; their Tallis Fantasia after the interval was equally nuanced in terms of tone-colour, if not dynamic range.

There were doubtless practical reasons why the different orchestras couldn’t be separated more widely in the church; and having had to prepare the Tabakova, it’s perhaps understandable if orchestra and choir sounded under-rehearsed and overblown in Vaughan Williams’s Towards the Unknown Region. But judge for yourself: the concert was recorded for future broadcast by BBC Radio Three.