The stars are brightly shining, angels are singing, wise men are travelling from afar to offer gifts to a baby, lying in a manger. And so the scene is set by O holy night for this festive album, which explores the Christmas story through music and words from across the ages. This uplifting carol, with its effortless melody, has become a popular favourite since it was written by Adolphe Adam in 1843, recorded by artists from cathedral choirs to Bing Crosby to Mariah Carey. Originally a setting in French of a poem Minuit, chrétiens by Placide Cappeau, and known as the Cantique de Noël the carol was translated, with plenty of artistic licence, into English in 1855 by John Sullivan Dwight.

Turn your mind’s eye now to a small parish church, lit by candles, and surrounded by fresh, white snow. That’s the setting for Sally Beamish’s beautiful unaccompanied carol In the stillness (2007) with original words by Katrina Shepherd. She transports us to a place of reflection and hushed rapture, full of anticipation for a ‘child, soon to be born’. Tamsin Jones’s Noel: verbum caro factum est (2017) offers a lively contrast, its vigorous rhythms harking back to the 15th century, when the carol’s anonymous text was written. Her music offers a bridge between past and present. The version sung here was published in 2020 in Multitude of Voyces, an anthology featuring sacred music by female composers.

A century before, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp were travelling the country to collect English folk songs. Independently, they both came across the celebratory Sussex Carol—Sharp in Gloucestershire and Vaughan Williams in Monk’s Gate, Sussex (hence the name), where he heard it sung by Harriet Verrall. Also known as On Christmas Night, this traditional carol’s roots stretch back centuries, with its text first published in 1684. Both David Willcocks and Philip Ledger, former directors of music at King’s College, Cambridge, made popular arrangements of it, and it is Ledger’s which is performed here.

Our attention moves to the figures around Christ, with John Rutter’s There is a flower, commissioned in 1985 for St John’s College Choir and its then director, George Guest. Setting a text by the 15th-century monk John Audelay, the carol opens with a solo introducing the ‘Jesse tree’, which refers to the image of a branching tree tracing Jesus’s ancestral family. A common subject in Christian art, it was often pictured in medieval illuminated manuscripts and stained glass. Flowers and plants recur throughout Christian iconography, and the rose has long been a powerful symbol for the Virgin Mary. There is no rose of such virtue is one of the best-known medieval carol texts, and it has been set by composers including Britten and Joubert but is sung here in an anonymous arrangement.

We find the image of the rose again in Herbert Howells’s Three Carol-Anthems, written between 1918 and 1920 when the British composer was in a period of convalescence after being severely ill with Graves’ Disease. (Later, much recovered, he would be the acting organist at St John’s College during the Second World War.) In A Spotless Rose, Howells sets, with mellifluous grace, an English version of the old German hymn Es ist ein Ros entsprungen. A baritone solo offers one of Howells’s breath-held moments of beauty, as does the ending. ‘I should like, when my time comes, to pass away with that magical cadence,’ the composer Patrick Hadley wrote to Howells. The lilting Sing lullaby follows, an anthem using words fresh from the pen of the Gloucestershire poet FW Harvey, a friend of poet-composer Ivor Gurney. Its lines seem to trace vaulting stone arches, reaching up to the heavens. And this masterful trio of pieces closes here with the poised Here is the little door, setting a poem about the visit of the Magi by author Frances Chesterton, whose husband was the Father Brown novelist GK Chesterton.

While Howells claimed to have been inspired to write A Spotless Rose somewhat prosaically, by watching shunting train trucks on the Gloucester to Bristol line, In dulci jubilo (‘In sweet rejoicing’) had rather more exalted beginnings. Angels sang the words to a 14th-century German mystic, Heinrich Seuse—at least, so the story goes. Whatever the truth of the matter, this ancient German tune has been heard in various musical guises through the centuries, including the uplifting eight-part arrangement in 1837, in Latin and English, made by Robert Lucas Pearsall ‘for the use of madrigal and choral societies’.

Some carols offer the chance to rejoice, while others provide a moment to reflect. Errollyn Wallen’s Peace on Earth is a case in point. Written in 2006 by Wallen, now Master of the King’s Music, her carol has become a contemporary classic conjuring, in her words, ‘the bleakness of winter in a turning troubled world’. A haunting vocal line floats over a slowly spinning ostinato and out of its mood of uneasy, exquisite beauty comes a message of ‘hope for light and peace’.

Felix Mendelssohn was working with a rather larger canvas in the 1840s when he composed 16 movements that would be published, after his death, as an incomplete oratorio about the life of Christ. Unfinished, perhaps, but the composer was on inspired form. Christus begins with Jesus’s birth, building from a soprano recitative (When Jesus, our Lord), via a warm trio for tenor and basses (Say, where is he born?) into the resplendent There shall a star for full choir.

Earlier that century, on the Christmas Eve of 1818, Franz Gruber was asked by his friend Father Joseph Mohr to set his poem Stille Nacht (Silent Night) to music—specifically for voices with a guitar accompaniment. Gruber worked fast and that very night, at Midnight Mass at St Nicholas’s in Obendorf, Austria, Stille Nacht was heard for the first time, offering its timeless vision of peace. The arrangement sung here is by organist Simon Morley.

‘I think I’ve put the best and most genuine part of myself into it,’ the French composer Poulenc said of his sacred music. It’s hard to disagree when listening to his Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël, four unaccompanied choral miniatures tracing scenes from the Christmas story. The profound O magnum mysterium unfolds slowly, building in its grave beauty as it explores the great mystery of the nativity. In Quem vidistis pastores dicite, we turn to the adoration of the shepherds, who are asked what they have seen in speech-like vocal lines rising and falling over a bed of humming. Videntes stellam evokes both the serene beauty and the majesty of a starlit sky, under which the Magi travel to offer their gifts of gold, incense and myrrh, while jubilation erupts in Hodie Christus natus est with triumphant dotted rhythms and dancing semiquavers celebrating Christ’s birth: ‘Glory to God in the highest. Alleluia.’

Becky McGlade was walking down a Cornish lane ‘on a cold, bleak November day’, when Christina Rossetti’s poem In the bleak mid-winter came to mind, known to so many music lovers in the settings by Holst and Darke. McGlade immediately began composing her own music as she walked, and the result is a carol with, in her words, ‘a gentle, undulating feel’. Hers is a vision of peaceful winter stillness rather than cold bleakness, with soft dissonances conjuring an ethereal snowy atmosphere. Across three verses, the music the same for each, the poem builds to its emotional payoff, with the final line ‘give my heart’ repeated by McGlade three times.

Simplicity is a key ingredient in Jonathan Dove’s The Three Kings too, commissioned for the 2000 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge. Dove takes his cue from the structure of Dorothy L Sayers’ poem, in which she dedicates a verse to each of the three kings: the ‘very young’, ‘the man in his prime’ and ‘very old’. Two haunting, ballad-like verses in a minor key, punctuated by the refrain of ‘O balow, balow la lay’, describe the Magi’s gifts of myrrh and incense. With the arrival of the third king, his hands full of gold, the music transforms into the major, the voices splitting into a glittering accompaniment and triumphant melody. After this celebratory outburst Dove leaves us, however, in reflective mood. The music gently subsides, leaving some questions unanswered. It is as if we are stepping back from the scene of the nativity, moved and forever changed by all we’ve experienced.

Rebecca Franks © 2025

Conductor’s reflections
Michaelmas Term at the University of Cambridge begins in October and runs to the end of November or start of December. For the Choir of St John’s College, term finishes with the Advent Carol Service which has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 most years since 1981. After a week or so off, the Choir has a tradition of performing Christmas concerts in some of Europe’s most prestigious venues. In my first two Christmases at St John’s, these have included Het Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Müpa Budapest, the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, the Philharmonie in Luxembourg and the Prinzregententheater in Munich. With this album, it is good to have the opportunity to record some of the repertoire we love sharing with the thousands of people who attend our Christmas concerts each year.

At the centre of the programme are the atmospheric Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël by Francis Poulenc, and the heartfelt Three Carol-Anthems by Herbert Howells who directed the Choir here at St John’s during the Second World War. Other items include the beautiful carol John Rutter wrote for the Choir in 1985, There is a flower, and the haunting Peace on Earth by Master of the King’s Music, Errollyn Wallen.

My aim with this album has not been to break new ground with repertoire, but to ensure that classics remain fresh for the current generation. As we prepare, in the words of Eric Milner-White’s great Bidding Prayer, to ‘hear again the message of the angels, and in heart and mind to go even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass, and the babe lying in a manger’, the music traverses different facets of the timeless story, ultimately asking what gifts we can bring to the new-born king. The journey encompasses both the human celebration of a birth and the divine mystery of God offering salvation through his son.

Christopher Gray © 2025