The Chorus of Westerly launches its historic 50th season by doing what it does best — singing beautiful choral music by a great English composer.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Hodie” (“This Day”) is the very model of a British Christmas oratorio, with Vaughan Williams’ signature folk melodies accompanying some of the finest seasonal English poetry.

The Chorus of Westerly has its roots in the church choir at Christ Church in Westerly, an Episcopal church where the young George Kent had the idea to expand his Sunday choir to a group that might take on challenging choral works with full orchestra and professional soloists. English music, from inside the church as well as out, has always been a fundamental item on the choir’s extensive menu.

This particular piece, “Hodie,” holds a special place for Kent and his choir as well. It was written in 1954, just a few years before the chorus was formed, and Vaughan Williams passed away in August, 1958, just as the Chorus of Westerly was getting its first rehearsals underway. The group presented “Hodie” in its second season, in 1960.

“Way back we did the third U.S. performance, and this work still holds a very special place for us,” says Kent. “It is perhaps the greatest of Christmas offerings with the biblical story interspersed with the poems of the giants of English literature.”

Those poets include John Milton, whose “Nativity Hymn” forms an epilogue to the cantata and whose “It Was the Winter Wild” is set for soprano and women’s voices; Thomas Hardy, whose famous poem “The Oxen” is sung by the baritone soloist, William Sharp; and George Herbert, William Ballet, William Drummond and others (Vaughan Williams’ wife Ursula contributed some of the text).

William Drummond’s 17th-century poem “Bright Portals of the Sky,” says tenor soloist Bryan Register, is “a very exciting tenor solo which I’m looking forward to performing. It is operatic and bold. Right up my alley.”

Register, a familiar face to audiences at the Chorus of Westerly performances, including the annual Celebration of Twelfth Night, adds that “Vaughan Williams and I go way back. I’ve done lots of his music. He’s my favorite English composer. I started working on some of his songs when I first started to study singing, and have had a steady diet of Vaughan Williams all along. I really enjoy singing his music because although it is undoubtedly English, his music also feels German to me. It’s very bulky, bold, lyric, broad, expansive ... all those words that I usually associate with German romanticism. Perhaps because he studied with Max Bruch in Berlin.”

Register, an up-and-coming tenor, has good reason to feel a special affinity for German romantic music. He’s been selected by the prestigious Wagner Society of Washington, D.C., under the guidance of Evelyn Lear, to study the music of Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, and for the past two months he’s been auditioning at the great Wagnerian opera houses of Germany.

“It’s really been the opportunity of a lifetime,” Register says. “I have been able to travel and sing in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Munich, Vienna, Innsbruck, Karlsruhe, Rostock and Hamburg. I’ve been able to sing some of the world’s most glorious music in the places where it was conceived, for the people it was intended. That’s both very exciting and a little intimidating, but what an thrill!”

Register is poised to begin a new career, focused on the legendarily daunting operas of the German romantics (a Wagner tenor would be called upon to sing such demanding roles as Siegfried, Tristan and the Flying Dutchman).

“After working on Wagner and Strauss roles for a year with Mrs. Lear,” he says, “they’ve sent me over to Germany to try to get work, since it is very difficult to sustain yourself doing Wagner and Strauss in America. It really isn’t done that much and is quite expensive. So, it’s been a very successful trip, with lots of good auditions.” Now, says Register, “I can only keep my fingers crossed.”

Another familiar voice for Westerly audiences, soprano Paula Rockwell, will perform the “Lullabye” set to a poem by Elizabethan poet William Ballet, and Milton’s song, “It Was the Winter Wild.” Rockwell has appeared many times in leading roles for the Chorus of Westerly’s Celebration of Twelfth Night, and has been a soloist for the Summer Pops concerts as well as the classical concerts given each fall and spring.

Rockwell will also lead a free vocal master class for area high school and college students, on Friday, Nov. 21 at 10:30 a.m.

Baritone soloist William Sharp, a “sensitive and subtle singer” according to the New York Times, returns to the Chorus of Westerly to sing Vaughan Williams’ setting of Hardy’s poem “The Oxen,” along with the “Pastorale” by metaphysical poet George Herbert, and a duet with Rockwell, “Ring Out, Ye Crystal Spheres,” from a poem by Milton.

“Hodie” is one of the last large-scale choral works Vaughan Williams composed, and it represents many of his great interests — the English choral tradition, folk songs and vernacular British speech in music, and the interweaving of soloist with chorus, organ with orchestra.

Ralph Vaughan Williams (his first name is pronounced “Rafe,” like Rafe Rackstraw in “H.M.S. Pinafore” or the actor Ralph Fiennes) was born in 1872 in the Cotswold village of Down Ampney. He was educated at Charterhouse School, then Trinity College, Cambridge. Later, he was a pupil of Stanford and Parry at the Royal College of Music, after which he studied with Max Bruch in Berlin and Maurice Ravel in Paris.

At the turn of the last century he was among the very first to travel into the countryside to collect folk-songs and carols from singers, notating them for future generations to enjoy. As musical editor of The English Hymnal he composed several hymns that are now worldwide favourites, such as “For All the Saints” and “Come Down, O Love Divine.” He also helped edit the influential and encyclopedic “Oxford Book of Carols,” a book still in use today, 70 years after it was first published.

During World War I, Vaughan Williams volunteered to serve in the Field Ambulance Service in Flanders, and he was deeply affected by the carnage, and by the loss of close friends such as the composer George Butterworth. He had a long and deep friendship with the English composer Gustav Holst, and for many years Vaughan Williams conducted and led the Leith Hill Music Festival. He also became professor of composition at the Royal College of Music in London.

During his lifetime, Vaughan Williams eschewed all honours with the exception of the Order of Merit, which was conferred upon him in 1938. He died in August 1958, and his ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey, near the body of his greatest predecessor, Henry Purcell.

Vaughan Williams’ work included nine symphonies, five operas, film music, ballet and stage music, several song cycles, church music and works for chorus and orchestra. Several of his pieces, including “The Lark Ascending,” are regularly put at the top of popular classic music charts, both in England and abroad.

“That sense of the miraculous in life, nature and the divine permeates much of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ choral music,” writes the critic Jonathan Yungkans, “and can transmit itself to listeners in a quantum leap.”

I you go ... Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Hodie will be performed by the Chorus of Westerly, Sunday, Nov. 23 at 4 and 6 p.m., at 119 High Street, Westerly. Tickets range from $14 to $35 and may be ordered by calling the Chorus of Westerly box office at 401-596-8663, Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., or click here at any time to visit the Chorus’ Web site. Music Director George Kent will present an informal concert preview on Saturday, Nov. 22 at noon. Admission to this lecture is free.