Proms premieres, cathedral commissions, BBC broadcasts: in some ways, Kristina Arakelyan’s career is as British as it gets. This is hardly surprising: having studied at the Purcell School for Young Musicians, the Royal Academy of Music, Oxford University and King’s College London, Arakelyan is fundamentally a product of the English educational establishment, through and through. A long association with the BBC Singers, beginning when she won the BBC Young Composer Competition at the age of fifteen, a formative fellowship with the National Youth Choir of Great Britain and a commission from St Paul’s Cathedral have seen her writing for some of the country’s leading choirs. And recent compositions—a companion piece for Britten’s Ceremony of Carols and a piece for the newest ‘Carols for Choirs’ anthology among them—attest to the extent to which her music is becoming embedded in the very fabric of the English choral tradition.

Yet this is only one half of the story. Born in Budapest and raised until the age of twelve in Yerevan, Armenia, as a child Arakelyan was immersed in the music of the Armenian Apostolic Church. As a chorister, in the Sunday liturgies she sang the ancient Sharaknots, modal chants thought to have originated in the fifth century and that were subsequently harmonised in the nineteenth century. Moreover, she experienced first-hand a style of worship that places mysticism at its heart, that architecturally uses a large, floor-to-ceiling veil to depict a heavenly sanctuary, and that sees its chief function as drawing the congregation towards the ineffable divine. The music and the traditions of the Armenian Church thus sank deep into her bones. Arakelyan’s Armenian heritage is not just a matter of personal importance, although performing her own piano concerto with the Armenian State Symphony in spring 2025 was of course a moment of great joy for her; rather, it is a key aspect of her compositional voice.

Arakelyan’s choral music, then, might best be understood as fusing elements of the English choral style with aspects of the Armenian Apostolic tradition. This is certainly true of A Christmas Offering, a substantial work for choir and harp from which the album takes its title. The composer readily cites A Ceremony of Carols as a chief inspiration for this piece; indeed, the spirit of Britten surely hung in the air during its 2024 premiere at Snape Maltings with Pembroke College Chapel Choir and Anna Lapwood. Arakelyan sang Britten’s work as a teenager, and recalls being captivated by its vivid imagery and captivating melodic lines. Like Britten, Arakelyan draws her texts from mediaeval carols in Latin and early-modern English, which celebrate the birth of Christ while also looking ahead to his suffering and crucifixion. The music evokes a Western mediaeval soundscape through archaic open-fifth intervals, Lydian modal influences and fast, iambic rhythms—particularly in some of the more upbeat movements, such as ‘Gaudete’. More Eastern influences are never far away, though, and often come to the fore in the softer, slower movements. Exotic pentatonic scales infuse ‘Out of the East’, while an elusive modal mixture of major and minor keys conveys a sense of divine mystery in ‘Jesu, Jesu’.

It is in some of the individual choral motets where ecclesiastical mysticism really comes to the fore, though. Arakelyan explains that O Adonai, which was commissioned by the BBC Singers and first performed in December 2024, was ‘inspired by the act of prayer’. The piece begins almost with a whisper, as different sections of the choir come in on a single pitch—E—repeating the words ‘O Adonai’ to the same, simple rhythmic figure. This is a text of strength, though—one of the O Antiphons, sung during the final days of Advent—and speaks of God appearing to Moses through a burning bush. Accordingly, the texture and register of the voices slowly and ineluctably expand outwards in both directions from the single starting note, and builds to a radiant climax on the word ‘Law’, before the work retracts again for its final phrases to the note on which it began. The chords in this work have a clear tonal root but also have one or two (or sometimes more) dissonant notes added, in what is coming to be known in contemporary choral composition as the ‘ecstatic style’.

Repeated notes and drones are in fact a recurring compositional device in Arakelyan’s output, and also form a fundamental building block in Sanctus, which was composed especially for this album. Like O Adonai, this work begins on a single note—this time D—and the voices gradually fan outwards, often by just two more notes. The effect chord-to-chord is perhaps the sonic equivalent of looking through a kaleidoscope toy, where with each single twist the makeup of the colourful mosaic shifts slightly. The short work concludes with an atmosphere of understated exuberance, with ‘Hosanna in excelsis’ set to slowed-down syncopations and jazzy chordal clusters. In the Christian liturgy of the Mass, the ‘Sanctus’ is the moment where the doors of heaven are inched open and the congregation hears the choir of angels singing their own hymn of praise; Arakelyan’s setting captures precisely that aesthetic.

Arakelyan notes that Te lucis ante terminum and Evening Prayer were both influenced by ‘the mystery of night-time prayers, repetition and silence’. Te lucis ante terminum was composed for the Choir of King’s College London, in partnership with Choir & Organ magazine for their New Music Series. The opening and closing sections feature soprano and tenor solos, in a gentle ‘call and response’ with the full choir. The text of the middle section grapples with ‘ill dreams’ and ‘nightly fears’, and the harmonies here become darker and a little more static—pleading for protection through the night. Evening Prayer was composed as a short introit for St Paul’s Cathedral, and sets a single verse from Psalm 141, about a prayer rising in the same way as incense wafts up from a thurible. Although an atmosphere of serenity is sustained throughout this piece, the composer wanted to challenge the expert singers of St Paul’s, and put them through their paces with a series of complex modulations and harmonic relationships.

Echo brings us back to Britten. It was composed as one of four choral companion pieces to his Four Sea Interludes (from Peter Grimes), and was first performed by the BBC Singers, alongside Anna Lapwood’s organ transcriptions of Britten’s Interludes. Arakelyan was particularly taken by the emotional richness and poignancy of Christina Rossetti’s text. Again, certain pitches perform an anchoring function in the compositional structure: in this case, the three-note chord (E flat, A flat, B flat) that begins the piece recurs throughout, and also features significantly at the end, its unresolved nature conveying the lack of resolution for the text’s protagonist. Certain glimmers of brightness notwithstanding (‘eyes as bright / As sunlight on a stream’), an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and longing pervades this work.

Ave maris stella, You know me and Christmas Lullaby form a little triptych of short sacred works designed to be lyrical and approachable for all choirs. Ave maris stella was composed for the sixth volume of Oxford University Press’s ‘Carols for Choirs’ anthology, and offers a tranquil setting of this hymn to the Virgin Mary, which invokes her blessing as ‘star of the sea’ on travellers. You know me sets Psalm 139 (in the New International Version), which also references the sea as it speaks to the intimacy of God’s love. This setting for upper voices sees long, flowing melodies unfolding over effortless arpeggios in the piano. One of the earliest works on the album, this was also commissioned by Anna Lapwood for Pembroke College Chapel Choir. Christmas Lullaby consists of Arakelyan’s own assemblage of biblical passages to create two separate narratives—the first depicting a mother’s lullaby to her son and the second giving an account of Christ’s life. Tender melodies belie a harmonic complexity that sees the music roving through an adventurous succession of keys, before returning home for the final ‘Amen’.

Dreamland sets Christina Rossetti’s poem of the same name, but did not begin life in sung form. In fact, initially called ‘Rhapsody’, the first iteration of this work was as a ballet score for piano and wind quintet, and it has since also been transcribed into versions for solo piano and for solo voice and piano. Even in its vocal versions the music retains something of the grace of ballet dancers, particularly in the piano writing. The work was originally composed in the bleak pandemic months of 2020, and its forlorn melodic lines lend themselves naturally to Rossetti’s poem, with its connotations of death. Just as the poem charts a progression from the brightness of day into a gentle twilight, so the song drifts meditatively into slumber, one solo singer left to declaim the ‘perfect peace’.

Joseph Fort © 2025

As anyone working in education will attest, one of the greatest joys of the job is watching former students of the institution go out into the world and flourish. Since the completion of her PhD in Composition at King’s, Kristina’s career has blossomed spectacularly (as her biography elsewhere in this booklet demonstrates), and I feel enormously fortunate that we are able to celebrate our connection with her through this album.

While preparing this album, I have been struck by many aspects of Kristina’s music, and have talked with her about it at length. I will just mention two things here that I believe are particularly relevant to this recording. The first is Kristina’s deeply felt connection with the emotion latent in any text that she sets; she approaches the compositional task as an exercise in conveying this emotion and stirring it in her listeners, and I hope that this comes through in our performances. And the second is her ability to ‘tell a story’ in her music, whether of Christ’s birth or an absent lover; again, I hope that this comes over in the delivery.

Many people and institutions made this project possible, and we are grateful to them all. The Vaughan Williams Foundation, PRS Foundation and King’s College London provided generous funding. Claire Long and Meg Davies of Music Productions brought the project to life and lifted it with visionary expertise. Steve Long, Nigel Short, Mike Hatch, Will Good, Kim Bourlet and all the team at Signum and Floating Earth have been inspirational to work with. St Jude on the Hill proved a beautiful place to make the recording, and Susie Gregson and her colleagues there were instrumental in enabling this. My King’s colleagues Ellen Clark-King, Tim Ditchfield, Clare Dowding and Nat Frangos have as always been enormously supportive. Finally, I am truly grateful to Kristina for trusting us with her music!

Joseph Fort © 2025