Biblical scholarship suggests that Mary was still a teenager, perhaps 16 or younger, when an angel appeared to her announcing she would bear a son named Jesus. Mary was engaged to be married at the time, and a virgin. No wonder she was ‘greatly distressed’, as St Luke’s gospel puts it. Some of Mary’s trepidation can be felt in the Basque folk-carol The Angel Gabriel (Track 8), whose verses are bookended by a sense of minor-key introspection. A solemn tone also suffuses Vaughan Williams’s English folk carol arrangement The truth from above (Track 9), despite the underlying certitude that God’s plan is to ‘redeem us by his Son’. For all the world-historical significance of Christ’s birth, however, Mary’s experience of it retains a striking human intimacy, as both Philip Moore’s gentle organ meditation O magnum mysterium (Track 13) and Philip Stopford’s tender There is no rose (Track 11) clearly demonstrate. June Clark’s 1966 setting Let us light a candle (Track 5) distils a similarly restrained ambience, while marvelling that ‘at this one space in time and place’ we find ‘containèd all the means of grace’.

A cause for joy
Daunting as the annunciation undoubtedly was for Mary, did she feel elation too? Bob Chilcott’s Nova, Nova! (Track 10) suggests as much, in its energetically bounding rhythms. The sunny, upbeat demeanour of People, look East (Track 7), a Besançon carol tune to words by Eleanor Farjeon, reinforces Gabriel’s message that ‘Love, the Lord, is on the way’. So too do Buxtehude’s brightly reassuring chorale prelude In dulci jubilo (Track 6) and the gently celebratory All bells in paradise (Track 17), written by John Rutter for the 2012 Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College, Cambridge.

Christ’s arrival among humankind has, in the two millennia since, often engendered pure, unmitigated joy as a reaction. Mack Wilberg’s jaunty arrangement of the traditional Ding Dong! Merrily on High (Track 14) expresses this, as does John Rutter’s arrangement of The Sans Day Carol (Track 15), with its chirruping organ accompaniment. And the particular experiences of Mary, watching her son perform good works in the world, are breezily explored in Stephen Cleobury’s arrangement of the medieval carol Joys Seven (Track 12).

A touch of brass
The ring of brass instruments can add a stirring ceremonial element to the singing of Christmas music, strengthening communal bonds among both performers and congregation. On this recording, The Band of His Majesty’s Royal Marines Collingwood adds lustre to Bob Chilcott’s 2023 setting of the traditional The First Nowell (Track 16), commissioned by The Church of England. Gleaming brass fanfares have also been added to Once in Royal David’s City (Track 1) and Hark the Herald Angels Sing (Track 18). These were specially written by George Richford, professor of music at the Royal Marines, for Midnight Mass at Portsmouth Cathedral on 24 December 2023, a service broadcast on BBC television.

Hope amid the darkness
There is, of course, a darker side to the Christmas story, where the happy circumstances of Jesus’s arrival in the world are grimly counterbalanced by the shocking manner of his later condemnation and death. Elements of Christ’s future suffering are hauntingly foreshadowed in Peter Warlock’s Bethlehem Down (Track 4). ‘When He is King they will clothe Him in grave-sheets’, verse three begins. ‘Myrrh for embalming, and wood for a crown.’

That the battle between good and evil is ever-present in human history, the ‘voices of a world in grief’ in Glenn Rudolph’s carol Veiled in darkness (Track 2) remind us. The Christian hope is that the ‘glorious light’ of Christ can, triumphantly, ‘darkness pierce again’, and that God will, in the words of the solemn Advent Prose (Track 3), ‘remember not our sins forever’.

Terry Blain © 2025