A CHOIR based in Richmond is offering free tickets to its next concert on December 8 but, like all such offers, there are conditions – anyone applying must be at least 90 to qualify.

Richmondshire Choral Society's winter concert will mark the centenary of the end of the Great War with suitable choral music including two works by Ralph Vaughan Williams. One is his song, Beyond the Unknown Region, which the choir’s records show they last performed in 1928.

Having calculated it is just possible someone still alive could have been at that performance, the choir will offer a free seat to anyone offering reasonable evidence that they were there.

Other works are American composer Morten Lauridsen’s ethereal Lux aeterna, and Vaughan Williams’ Dona nobis pacem which the choir performed in April 2014 to mark the start of the First World War centenary commemorations.

It was written in 1938 as both a delayed reaction to the horrors he witnessed in the Great War as an ambulance driver at the front and a warning of the impending doom building in Europe.

It will be the choir’s first concert under the baton of the new conductor, Peter Stallworthy, who took over in September. Mr Stallworthy conducted choirs and orchestras mainly in the Manchester and Cheshire area before moving to North Yorkshire.

Publicity officer Janet Hall said: “Our choir has been inspired by all three of these works and looks forward to an excellent concert conducted by Peter Stallworthy. The words of American poet Walt Whitman so eloquently set by Vaughan Williams and the mystical quality of Lauridsen’s music all give out a strong message of a desire for peace.

"If we find someone who was at our 1928 performance that’s an added bonus.”

Full details are at richchoral.org.uk.