On those rare occasions when film turns its attention towards classical music, it usually privileges the tormented lone genius. Recent films about composers (Maestro), conductors (Tár) and singers (Maria) have all been portraits of people of exceptional talent and significant character flaws. But there is a secondary genre, which explores the dynamics among groups of musicians, whether troubled (A Late Quartet) or redemptive (Les Choristes).

It is in the latter genre that we must place Alan Bennett and Nicholas Hytner’s film The Choral, set during the First World War. A Yorkshire choral society hires a controversial new music director with high ambitions (Ralph Fiennes), who recruits teenage boys and convalescent soldiers to swell the otherwise ageing male ranks for an unusual performance of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius. On the face of it, this is just another of those feelgood British movies, like Brassed Off or Bennett’s own The History Boys, but for the serious music lover it may offer something more.

As Richard Bratby has written, ‘there’s definitely no point getting hung up on the historical accuracy (or otherwise)’ of this film in terms of musical details. Certain matters of historical fact surrounding the reception of Elgar’s oratorio, and of German music during the Great War, have had to be simplified in order to convey the story swiftly and efficiently to a non-specialist audience. But Bennett certainly ‘gets’ how choral societies tick, skilfully capturing the tedium of note-bashing as well as the euphoria of the post-concert buzz. ‘It’s not lasses we want,’ one character laments: this is a perennial problem for choirs, and not only in wartime.

The film shows us snobbish altos of a certain age who are ‘particular’ about who they will sit with, pompous committee members who explode at the prospect that they should have to re-audition, a frustrated choral director whose patience eventually wears thin. These may seem like stereotypes, exploited for comedic effect, but anybody who has sung in a choral society will almost certainly have met them. At the heart of the choir are three pillars of the community, played by Alun Armstrong, Mark Addy, and Roger Allam, the latter’s character the choir chairman who has always (until now) been rewarded with solos in return for his largesse.

The Choral shows how music-making can bind together a community, forging connections between people of different social classes, backgrounds, occupations and ages like virtually no other activity. Music director Dr Henry Guthrie (Fiennes) hunts for his new recruits in the pub, the bakery and the convalescent hospital. The teenagers huddle on street corners to practise choruses and hum the oratorio’s earworms as they cycle around the town and go about their work. None of this is rose-tinted. Delve back into British history and you will find many idealistic people who set up musical groups that recruited across the class divide. After the Second World War, for instance, June Gordon, Countess of Haddo, established a choral society at her estate north of Aberdeen, recruiting estate workers and persuading her initially sceptical singers to tackle increasingly difficult repertoire, even opera.

The Germanophile Guthrie is too quick to judge his choristers when he complains, near the film’s beginning, that ‘The English think music is just social life carried on by other means.’ Bennett’s film shows that the music itself also becomes deeply meaningful to the choir’s members. I have often heard serious music lovers say they have a problem with The Dream of Gerontius, speculating that one has to be a Roman Catholic to appreciate it. I don’t agree, but I have often wondered whether you have to be a choral singer. There are, it strikes me, additional layers of emotional resonance to this richly expressive work that can only be discovered from within.

The Choral’s northern-ness is integral to it. Saltaire, the exquisitely preserved Victorian mill-village near Bradford, and the surrounding moors provide a picturesque backdrop. The film showcases promising young northern actors, most notably Jacob Dudman and Amara Okereke as the oratorio’s soloists, and the music we hear is sung by members of local choral societies, recruited via social media. Bennett understands not only the tight-knit nature of northern communities (as explored previously in A Private Function), but also the fact that northerners used to be particularly noted for their musicality. As the musical agent Lionel Powell told the Daily News in 1925: ‘There is no doubt about the north being more musical than the south.’ Yorkshire was proud of its choral societies, Leeds the most opera-mad city in the land.

The Choral is moving on various counts. We meet bright, cheeky young men who will be off for northern France as soon as they come of age, and others who have returned, limbless and cynical. All are desperate for sexual encounters that will give them comfort, a first foothold on the ladder of adulthood, or simply a sense of being alive. A Leitmotif running throughout the film is the teenage postman – himself soon destined for the front – who knocks repeatedly on doors, dropping off telegrams to sobbing women. But the film is also poignant because it seems to represent another type of loss, and this is one that only the musically informed viewer will appreciate.

Repeatedly, nowadays, we are told – even by people in the arts world – that classical music is exclusive rather than inclusive, that it is the preserve of the middle classes and that it is appreciated only by people who have acquired some sort of by-implication unfair ‘social capital’. The Choral is a lament for an age before such ideas had taken grip, when joining a local choir was a mainstream hobby for young people, when ordinary British people knew their Gilbert and Sullivan and their Handel arias, and when it was still considered acceptable to talk about classical music’s ‘universal’ and ‘uplifting’ qualities. At the end, I found myself weeping not only for the tragedy of the doomed youngsters, and for the heightened emotion of Elgar’s music, but also for the very fact that someone still cared enough about choirs, and how much they mean to their participants, to make a film about one.