Shepherd’s Pipe Carol, celebrating the piping of a shepherd boy on his way to see the Christ-child at Bethlehem, is quintessentially festive Rutter – sprightly, syncopated, rhythmically taut, and a must on any short-list for the nomination of a Rutter signature tune. It was written in the 1960s for a concert performance with orchestra given at Clare College, Cambridge, while Rutter was still an undergraduate. He fancies the inspiration may just have been the experience of singing as a boy soprano in Menotti’s legendary Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors: ‘I think the piping heard as Amahl heads for Bethlehem with the Wise Men may have stuck in my mind.’ Rutter also relishes the unlikely but apparently true story that the carol was something of a talisman in the Baltic States in the fraught days before Soviet control finally broke down: ‘I’ve heard that it was secretly circulated on photocopies and by fax … choirs were singing it as a kind of badge of resistance!’
from notes by Andrew Green © 2001
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