A prickly Ralph Fiennes uplifts a town through music during WWI in 'The Choral'

A prickly Ralph Fiennes uplifts a town through music during WWI in 'The Choral' A prickly Ralph Fiennes uplifts a town through music during WWI in 'The Choral' Audio will be available later today. Henry Guthrie, played by Ralph Fiennes, is uncompromising in his pursuit of musical excellence as he overhauls a struggling northern English choir during World War I in The Choral. Nicola Dove/Sony Pictures Classics hide caption toggle caption The year is 1916. The fictional northern England town of Ramsden offers such a bucolic setting in The Choral , with lush hills, singing birds and polite humor exchanged between locals that one could forget there's a war raging on. But young men are getting conscripted, including some of the best singers from the local choir. The choral society turns to Henry Guthrie, played by Ralph Fiennes, an uncompromising musician who's built a career in Germany, to become their new chorus master. He recruits women and men either too young or too old to fight. YouTube Faced with the brutality of war, the town grieves as its young men are taken to be sent to their likely deaths. What it finds in music is more than consolation, director Nicholas Hytner told NPR's Michel Martin. "Music is an expression of community. It's a way to survive. But it's also a way to insist that in spite of this terrible disaster, this catastrophe that is being visited upon them," Hytner added. "There is an insistence that there are ways of getting to the other side without collapsing into complete despair. And I suppose that's what music does in this film." World War I is well underway and in a few months, the Battle of the Somme will leave more than a million casualties across German and Allied forces, making it one of history's bloodiest battles. The choir in the fictional town where The Choral is set loses its best singers as younger men get conscripted to fight in World War I. From left: Shaun Thomas as Mitch, Taylor Uttley as Ellis and Oliver Briscombe as Lofty. Nicola Dove/Sony Pictures Classics hide caption toggle caption German music thus being unacceptable to the town, Guthrie trains up the choir - which evolves musically from dreadful to majestic - in performing an English work that lifts the town's spirits. It's Edward Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius . The oratorio was written for orchestra and voices. But due to wartime limited means, Guthrie arranges the piece for a string trio, choir and three soloists. He has a young wounded veteran playing the part of a man dying and journeying through purgatory, causing Elgar himself, who is played by Simon Russell Beale, to storm out of a rehearsal. Fiennes, who's directing his first opera early next year - Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin in Paris , years after his turn playing the title role in a 1999 film - said there's something about the collective focus of making music together that can take people to another plane. Mara...

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