Christmas round-up
When the King’s College Choir’s Nine Lessons and Carols service was cancelled due to Covid in 2020, a set of prerecorded performances was broadcast instead. Most of the tracks on In the Bleak Midwinter, the choir’s new recording, are drawn from that. They include seasonal favourites such as ‘Once in Royal David’s city’, ‘O come, all ye faithful’ and ‘Hark! the herald angels sing’, all sounding more affectingly intimate than usual in a chapel empty of the usual congregation. The voices are warmly blended by Daniel
Hyde, director of music since 2019, and show the choir confidently developing a fresh identity in the post-stephen Cleobury era. (King’s College KGS0060) ★★★★
Bells, bagpipes and hurdygurdy are among the instruments accompanying the three female singers in Boston Camerata’s Hodie Christus Natus Est, a selection of hymns and songs from the medieval period. The Nativity is the main focus, and highlights include the rasp and peal of ‘Adest Sponsus’, the vocal curlicues in ‘Lux refulget’, and leader Anne Azéma’s apostrophising of Mary in ‘Flur de virginité’, accompanied by what sounds like a medieval banjo. The earthy instrumental twang of ‘Edi be thu hevene quene’ exudes strong folk influences, and overall this recording taps joyfully into what Azéma calls the ‘less stressful tonality’ of a pre-commercial Christmas period. (Harmonia Mundi HMM 905339) ★★★★
In his excellent booklet essay to An Oxford Christmas, Jeremy Summerly calls The Oxford Book of Carols, published in 1928, ‘one of the most significant carol publications of all time’. Its moving spirit was Vaughan Williams, and 22 of the carols he arranged for the book – most of British origin – are given winning performances by the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, conducted by William Vann. Most of the carols – ‘The Salutation Carol’, ‘Joseph and Mary’, and ‘Coverdale’s Carol’ among them – are unfamiliar today, making this an intriguing anthology to investigate. (Albion Records ALBCD050) ★★★★
The viol consort Fretwork – currently celebrating its 35th anniversary – is joined on An Elizabethan Christmas by mezzosoprano Helen Charlston, in a selection of music heard in 16th-century royal circles. Byrd, Holborne, Gibbons, Weelkes and Peerson are the composers featured, and tracks like Byrd’s ‘Out of the Orient Crystal Skies’ and Weelkes’s ‘To Shorten Winter’s Sadnesse’ show voice and instruments interweaving in seamless expressivity. The songs are interspersed with short instrumental pieces, including two genial fantasies ‘for ye great dooble bass’ by Gibbons. All are played with Fretwork’s typical attunement to the sensibilities of the Elizabethan period. (Signum SIGCD680) ★★★★
Matthew Owens’s arrival at St Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast in
2019 signalled a new departure for music-making in the building, with the establishment of a professional adult choir to lead services. It is 16 voices strong and, on the evidence of A Belfast Christmas, an ensemble of high quality. There’s a strong emphasis on new and unfamiliar pieces, including Gary Davison’s limpid ‘Rorate coeli desuper’, with a crystalline solo from soprano Ali Darragh. The choir’s tonal purity and impeccable tuning are a pleasure, bringing plangency and repose to Philip Stopford’s ‘Lullay, my liking’, and a welling splendour to Philip Wilby’s ‘Moonless darkness stands between’.
(Resonus RES 10292) ★★★★★