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About Christmas
Christmas by The Gesualdo Six For centuries Christmas and the surrounding seasons have inspired composers to new heights of invention. This programme reaches across the ages, from the eternal beauty of the Tudor church right up to the twenty-first century, with each piece chosen to evoke a sense of mystery and joy. In the Renaissance, Advent—the weeks preceding the celebration of Christ’s birth at Christmas—was a time of wonder and reflection. Centuries-old carols tell this story, with some works presented here in their inherited form, others reimagined by skilled arrangers. Pieces that focus on the birth of Christ form the backbone of this collection: Thomas Hardy’s tableau of the scene on Christmas Eve is particularly striking, alongside music that heralds the baby’s arrival and offers insight into the first few weeks of Jesus’s life. Themes and forms are echoed through the ages: two lullabies, though written centuries apart, employ coaxing refrains to be sung to disquieted children; some of the most exquisite melodies are found in works dedicated to Mary. I hope that we have managed to capture something of the festive spirit, with moments of stillness set against joyful exuberance. It is music that we thoroughly enjoy singing—we all feel a certain magic when we revisit this repertoire towards the end of each year. Veni Emmanuel is an Advent hymn dating back to the Middle Ages, its roots being in plainchant antiphons used in the weeks leading up to Christmas. It is known to many in its English translation, ‘O come, Emmanuel’, heralding the arrival of the saviour. Philip Lawson’s arrangement pays homage to the chant-based melody, the sensitive writing for the accompanying parts gently supporting the familiar tune. German composer and theorist Michael Praetorius was one of the most versatile and prolific composers of his generation, but is perhaps best known for his adaptations of Protestant hymns. Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland a 6 takes a text by Martin Luther—a translation of the hymn ‘Veni, redemptor gentium’—and sets it to dramatic rhetorical effect, with imitative textures and arresting gestures constantly seizing the listener’s attention. As each new segment of the melody is introduced it is shortly followed by a series of increasingly florid embellishments—a constant rewiring of the texture that is interrupted with great impact to herald the final line, ‘Gott solch Geburt ihm bestellt’ (‘that God ordained him such a birth’). The Annunciation, a setting of words by the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir, was composed in 2011 for the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, by British composer Jonathan Harvey who believed this would be his final work. Harvey sought a form of spirituality with unity at its core, with particular emphasis on the interaction between energy and stillness, an approach that finds a parallel in the Advent season’s combination of expectation and reflection. The beginning of each stanza is marked by the introduction of a musical idea that subtly refers back to the opening statement. A moment of calm in the centre of the work—‘Feathered through time’—is later recaptured, as the ‘deepening trance’ of the final stanza is brought alive with a beautiful series of closing chords. Videte miraculum is a choral respond by Thomas Tallis which uses plainsong both as a solo line and dissolved into a beautifully woven six-part polyphonic texture. Particularly striking is the opening point of imitation on ‘miraculum’—a dissonance repeated in each vocal entry to hypnotic effect—as well as the radiant harmony at ‘Et matrem’ which seems to gain in intensity each time it returns (also notable as the piece is thought to have been written when Queen Mary I was with child). Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s The promised light of life sets a Latin text by St Bede, which is briefly conflated with a short phrase in English from the Revelation of St John the Divine: ‘I am the bright and morning star.’ The voices are gradually revealed through the
