Hearing Britten's Saint Nicolas sung by village choral societies in the overcrowded parish church at Aldeburgh last summer was an exhilarating experience. To begin with, there was the enormous satisfaction of being allowed to join in the singing of both the hymns in the cantata. Audiences are often given the courtesy-title of “congregation” when they turn up to listen to a concert in a church, but they are very seldom given the chance of justifying their existence. This was only one of the barriers that Saint Nicolas removed during the afternoon. There was also the appropriate absence of any rigid boundary between sacred and secular music. It would have been impossible for the listener to feel dismayed at the violent contrasts in the work: there seemed nothing in the least incongruous in the mixture of the gurgling of the bath-water and the contemplation of man's solitary wilderness of doubt and despair.