A Ceremony of Carols
The format of this recording is based on The Ebor Singers’ popular candlelit concerts held in the Chapter House of York Minster. Taking the lead from Britten's Ceremony of Carols, this collection draws on the rich tradition of Christmas words from the Middle Ages to the present day that has provided and continues to provide such a fertile source for composers of the twentieth century and modern day.
The first half of the collection is a ‘ceremony of carols’ based around the seven Advent Antiphons. These antiphons, dating from the 9th century, are sung before and after the Magnificat on the days approaching Christmas, their texts based on titles for the Messiah and drawing on the prophecies of Isaiah on the Messiah’s coming. This is in no way a liturgical reconstruction or an academic study; rather, the chant is included to provide a palette-cleansing contrast amidst the expressive harmonic language of the carols from the 20th century, though it may also suggest associations between the old and new, the contours of medieval plain chant and the melodies of Howells, Britten and Leighton.
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Some carols are based on medieval texts - A Hymn to the Virgin (Britten), There is no rose (Britten, Joubert), Lully, lulla (from the Coventry cycle of Mystery Plays) (Leighton), and A spotless rose (Howells), a 19th-century translation of the15th-century German. Typically, texts from the Middle Ages used conventions of imagery - for instance, likening the Blessed Virgin Mary to a rose (There is no rose) - and are macaronic, combining Latin and vernacular texts (There is no rose, A Hymn to the Virgin ). O magnum mysterium (Lauridsen) is inspired by an antiphon for Christmas Day from the Catholic liturgy.
Benjamin Britten’s Hymn to the Virgin is one of his earliest surviving works, written when he was just 17. This youthful work displays remarkable maturity and power. It is scored for two choirs, the first singing the English text, and the second (solo) group responding with the Latin, with a simple chant-like melody passed between the two. Morten Lauridsen is an American choral composer whose style is defined more by sonority rather than melodic interest, and O magnum mysterium (1994) is based around one of Lauridsen’s favourite chords, D major with an added E, which is expanded throughout the work, culminating with an ecstatic Alleluia. John Joubert, born in South Africa, settled in England after studying composition at the Royal Academy of Music. He achieved almost instant recognition through his carols Torches (1951), O Lorde, the maker of al thing (1952) and There is no rose (1954), and went on to write more choral works, as well as opera, orchestral and chamber music. Joubert matches the simple and beautiful English and Latin text of There is no rose with an uncomplicated melody for the English, and each verse concluding with an effusive phrase for the Latin. Kenneth Leighton was born in Yorkshire and studied at Oxford, and after a period of study abroad was appointed as a lecturer at Edinburgh University, where he remained until his death in 1988. The text of Lully, lulla (1956) is taken from one of the Coventry Corpus Christi mystery plays, at the point of the Massacre of the Innocents, when Herod’s soldiers put all baby children to death. It takes the form of a lullaby, with a soprano solo accompanied by a gentle rocking motion in the chorus, as the women put their children to sleep so that the soldiers will not hear them. Howells’ A spotless rose is the second of three carols he wrote between 1918 and 1920. Patrick Hadley told the composer that the cadence at the end of the piece was ‘a stroke of genius!’ to which Howells replied , ‘it makes my Advent. I had to make do without for the first time this last Advent for many years, and I've never been the same chap since...’. Bob Chilcott, a former Kings Singer, has established himself over the last decade as a leading choral composer. The shepherd’s carol was written for the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, in 2000, and displays his deceptively simple and unforced lyricism.
The origins of Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols occurred in the most unlikely of locations. In April of 1942, Britten was returning to Britain after a three-year stay in the United States. He was only able to obtain passage on a Swedish cargo vessel, and on this voyage Britten wrote that he had written 'a work [of Christmas carols] to alleviate the boredom'. Making use of only three treble voices and harp, Britten created sonorities that are now familiar but were then unprecedented. The sequence begins with the announcement of the angels to the shepherds, a chant that is sung at Vespers on Christmas Day. The chant reappears at the mid-point of the Ceremony in the sublime harp Interlude, where it is heard in the uppermost voice, worlds away from its original context. But the work is neither a narrative of the Nativity story nor a liturgical sequence: it is more a forerunner of the church parables, those richly dramatic, biblically derived works of Britten's later maturity that are themselves parodies of medieval morality plays.
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Listen to A Ceremony of Carols. Track listing and disk information is also available. [Listen]
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Buy A Ceremony of Carols securely online from Boreas Music.
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