The centenary of the start of the first world war is being marked by a batch of musical projects – I'm aware of six so far – but it will be difficult for other live events to match this original and powerful blend of music and spoken word. Barry Coope, Jim Boyes and Lester Simpson have been singing and writing about the horrors of the conflict since the 90s, performing on former battlefields or alongside the writer Michael Morpurgo, and they transformed the launch of their new album, In Flanders Fields, into an emotional new concept show featuring Morpurgo and the Paul Rans Ensemble from Flanders.

The staging was simple but effective. The cast performed beneath a screen that showed what they were reading or singing, including translations from Flemish and French, for this was a show in which the words were as important as the exquisite harmony singing. Morpurgo's opening reading, from the preface to All Quiet on the Western Front, the 1929 anti-war novel about young German recruits, was a reminder that the conflict would be seen from all sides.

Paul Rans sang Flemish songs that had been banned by the Germans, while Morpurgo opted not for his own work (there was nothing from War Horse or Private Peaceful) but for a selection that included only one of the best-known first world war poems – Wilfred Owen's Dulce Et Decorum Est. Elsewhere, Morpurgo's emotional reading of Carol Ann Duffy's Christmas Truce led into a song about that same remarkable event, while Seamus Heaney's In a Field, about a demobbed soldier, was placed against Spring 1919, a song of post-war devastation. Morpurgo ended with Raymond Briggs's poignant poem Aunties, about war widows, before joining in the encore, When This Blasted War Is Over. This show deserves to be repeated.