It was the final concert of the summer - Haydn's Creation, sung in a hilltop church on an evening of low cloud and rain.

It should have been one of those magical warm evenings when the dusky foliage on the trees seems almost luminous and the scent of flowers hangs in the air - after all, we were singing about the beauties of the earth.

But the music more than made up for the weather. It felt like the best we had ever sung it.

It was a long way from those early days, when we made our very first attempt to sing it. You wouldn't have wanted to hear us then. All those intricate interweaving harmonies were just a confusion of noise - it was impossible to tell how they were supposed to sound. If you listened to the piece on a CD it sounded joyful, exuberant. Hearing us, you wouldn't have thought we'd ever make anything like that kind of music.

Weeks of practice followed, slogging away at the choruses until our throats ached (all those sustained high notes play havoc with the vocal chords, if you're a soprano). At times we'd despair that we'd ever get it right.

Then at last comes that magical moment when, suddenly, as we work on one of the easier choruses, one short passage fits together. Basses, then tenors, raise their voices, following at exactly the right moment; then the altoes, and then we sopranoes, right on cue. Maybe it goes wrong again after that, but it's a start. We've done it once, for those few bars. We know that in time we'll do a bit more. So the practising goes on, and we find another section begins to come right. Weeks later perhaps, and we can sing each chorus through with only the odd mistake here and there.

But it's not until the night of the concert that we hear the piece as a whole. That's when we first hear how our own parts fit into the grand scale of the oratorio. The soloists tell the biblical story of the Creation in exquisite single lines, full of trills and runs, or with their interweaving voices in harmonies that lift the soul. Haydn's music - in voice and accompaniment - describes what the words tell, in those quaint 18th century words. "The flexible tiger appears", and you can hear him springing through the jungle, a big cat on the prowl. The dove coos in the soprano's voice and in the echoing notes that follow. The "sinuous worm" slides along the earth under the voice of the bass. You hear the hail and the rain and the billowing waves, and the fish darting through the depths.

No performance is ever perfect. But there are times when almost everything goes right, when we all know it sounds good. Whatever the weather outside, it was glorious in that church on the evening of our final concert, our voices in harmony singing of the loveliness of each created thing.

We didn't sing all of the work. We ended with the creation of man and woman, in that vision of human perfection in a perfect world. It's a good place to end, before the bit where we humans start to spoil the world in which we live.

I just hope that in 20, 30 years' time our grandsons will be able to hear this music still - perhaps even play their part in singing it. Even more, I hope that they will still be able to look at the world around them and recognise traces of that newly-created loveliness in all they see. It's up to us now to make sure that it's still there for those future generations.

Published: 28/07/2005