"Alan Bennett's new film, directed by Nicholas Hytner, is a quiet and consistent pleasure: an unsentimental but deeply felt drama which subcontracts actual passion to the music of Elgar and leaves us with a heartbeat of wit, poignancy and common sense. Music itself mysteriously exalts and redeems the community, and I mean it as the highest possible praise when I say that The Choral reminds me of Victoria Wood's musical That Day We Sang,"
"The place is upended by the arrival of Dr Guthrie (Ralph Fiennes) who is to be the choirmaster, directing the music society's annual production; he scandalises some with the fact that he once lived in Germany and has a scholar's love of that country's literature and music as well as the fact that he is a bachelor who had a close friendship with another young man now serving overseas."
The Choral is set in a fictional Yorkshire town during the First World War, focusing on men who are too old or too young to fight and the women who manage their repressed emotions. Dr Guthrie, a bachelor with German connections and a scholar's love of literature and music, upends the community when he becomes choirmaster and proposes a daring production of Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius. He obtains Elgar's permission for the performance. Music becomes a redemptive force for the town. The film balances humour and sorrow, treats sex unflinchingly, and presents a wintry, comic acknowledgment of mortality.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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