To read about the music we will perform, please just scroll down the page.

To access public (Wikipedia) information about the composers and/or the music, click the appropriate links in the following table.

Choir	New Chamber Singers Sopranos: Antonina Tetzlaff, Barbara Lauriat, Bea Swanson, Carlotta Caimi, Charlotte Baker, Diane Pereira, Helen Raiswell, India Clark, Ines Buono, Luisa Boccia, Marcella Mancini Altos: Alessandra Darin, Eleni Dimmler, Jo Glaiser, Judith Faulkner, Lu Zarkovic, Mary Horan, Mary New, Monika Boothby, Parker Skutt, Tina Alberti Tenors: Chris Phillips, Franco Chiarini, Giacomo Salvatori, Javier Moulie Hardie, Shawn McGuire, Stephen Weiss Basses: Chris Ballard, Jim McManus, Jörg Schaden, Marco Amaral, Roberto Di Mattei, Thomas Hofer, Tom Whalen
Conductor	Stefano Vasselli (1969 – )
Program	Kyrie from the Missa O Magnum Mysterium	Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 – 1594)
	Adam lay ybounden	Boris Ord (1897 – 1961)
	Gloria from the Missa O Magnum Mysterium	Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 – 1594)
	Today the Virgin	Sir John Kenneth Tavener (1944 – 2013)
	O magnum mysterium (motet – first part)	Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 – 1594)
	Quem vidistis pastores (motet – second part)	Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 – 1594)
	Benedicamus Domino	Peter Warlock (1894 – 1930)
	Sanctus and Benedictus from the Missa O Magnum Mysterium	Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 – 1594)
	Come, ye lofty, come, ye lowly	Gustav Theodore Holst (1874 – 1934)
	Jesu, Thou the virgin born	Gustav Theodore Holst (1874 – 1934)
	Agnus Dei from the Missa O Magnum Mysterium	Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 – 1594)

In this concert, we look both backward at what lies behind the birth of Christ and forward to the great day itself.

Missa O Magnum Mysterium and motet. We take as our theme Palestrina’s Missa O Magnum Mysterium (also known as the Missa Tertia) and the motet from which it is derived. Palestrina was 43 years old and at the height of his career when he wrote the motet. He based it on the Gregorian responsorial chant of the same name for Matins, and with its rich and ornate style, he addresses contemporary complaints about the simplicity of religious works. However, his six-voice setting makes the complexity of polyphony more accessible to the audience, using fewer melismas and allowing the voices to sing the same syllables simultaneously. The effect is an expression of the shepherds’ joy and wonder as they celebrated the birth of Christ.

Twenty-three years later, he used the motet as the basis for the Mass, one of the incredible 105 he wrote during his lifetime. We sing all the movements except the Credo.

But interspersed between the movements of the Mass are 19th- and 20th-century arrangements of Advent and Christmas themes by various British composers.

Adam lay ybounden. Boris Ord was born in 1897 and studied at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, where he was the Rannoch Scholar in Sacred Music. He spent most of his working life in Cambridge, where he became closely associated with the popularisation of the Christmas celebration “Nine Lessons and Carols”.

Traditionally, Christmas is celebrated, in both the Anglican and Catholic Churches, with Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve. But in the 1880s, when the Bishop of Truro in southwest England was faced with falling attendances, caused mainly by the attraction of the pub, he inaugurated a new kind of celebration on Christmas Eve. Until that date, singers (called Waits) went from house to house singing carols and begging alms for the poor. The bishop created a service where the carols would be sung in the church by the church choir and/or the congregation, and together with nine readings from the bible, would tell the Christmas story, from the prophecies of the Messiah’s coming to the flight into Egypt. He called this service a “Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols”.

It proved very successful, and as news of the idea spread, it began to be performed all over the land. The most famous version of this service was initiated by Eric Milner-White in the beautiful King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, on Christmas Eve, in 1918. It was first broadcast on radio by the BBC 10 years later, and, since 1930, thanks to BBC World Service broadcasts, it has been heard around the world, live on Christmas Eve and retransmitted on Christmas Day. 

Ord had collaborated with Milner-White and the BBC in this production, and took over as conductor in 1938, and he was still conductor when “Nine Lessons and Carols” made its debut on television in 1954. Nowadays, almost every church in Britain offers this service in the few days before Christmas. The structure of the service allows a church choir to sing several beautiful carols that are not well known to the public and the most popular of these is probably “Adam Lay Ybounden”. In Ord’s time he must have conducted hundreds of carols in this service written by other composers, but he only wrote and published this one, and it is his only work of any type to be published. 

It is based on an anonymous 15th Century English Christian text, which uses the book of Genesis to indicate that Christ’s birth was all pre-ordained – if Adam had not taken the apple, Christ would not have redeemed humanity.

Today the Virgin. Sir John Kenneth Tavener was an English composer of choral religious works. Born in 1944, he was already composing important works while at school, and went on to study at the Royal College of Music. His inspiration to become a composer came principally from Mozart and Stravinsky. During his career he became one of the best known and popular composers of his era and won many awards, including a knighthood in 2000.

Tavener converted to the Orthodox Church in 1977 and its theology and liturgical traditions became a major influence on his work, including on the piece we perform, “Today the Virgin”, written by Tavener in 1989, which takes its inspiration from a poem by Mother Tekla, a teacher, nun and founder of the Orthodox Monastery of the Assumption in North Yorkshire.

Benedicamus Domine. Philip Arnold Heseltine, known by the pseudonym Peter Warlock, was a British composer and music critic. The Warlock name, which reflects Heseltine’s interest in occult practices, was used for all his published musical works. He is best known as a composer of songs and other vocal music; he also achieved notoriety in his lifetime through his unconventional and often scandalous lifestyle.

Born in 1894, he attended the famous Eton School, where, encouraged by the music teacher, he became almost obsessed with the music of Frederick Delius. While still at Eton in 1911 he attended a Delius concert in the composer’s presence, after which he wrote to the composer and subsequently met him, initiating a friendship that endured all his life. He started studying at Oxford and later at University College, London, but he found studing difficult.

In 1917, as WW1 ground on seemingly without an end in sight, to avoid being conscripted into the British Army, he moved to Ireland, and it is there that he wrote Benedicamus Domine. It is a treatment of an anonymous text, from the same 15th Century collection as “Adam lay ybounden”, hailing Christ’s birth.

In 1930 he died of gas poisoning in his basement flat. Although no note was found, it is thought that he took his own life. Back in the mid-20s he had written his own epitaph:

   Here lies Warlock the composer
      Who lived next door to Munn the grocer.
   He died of drink and copulation,
      A sad discredit to the nation.

Come, ye lofty, come, ye lowly and Jesu, Thou the virgin born. Gustav Holst (born Gustavus Theodore von Holst) was, despite his Germanic name, an English composer, arranger and a very well-respected teacher, particularly for women musicians. Best known for his orchestral suite The Planets, written during WW1, he composed many other works across a range of genres, although none achieved comparable success. His distinctive compositional style was the product of many influences, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss being most crucial early in his development. The subsequent inspiration of the English folksong revival of the early 20th century, and the example of such rising modern composers as Maurice Ravel, led Holst to develop and refine an individual style.

A shy man, he did not welcome this fame, and preferred to be left in peace to compose and teach. In his later years his uncompromising, personal style of composition struck many music lovers as too austere, and his brief popularity declined. Nevertheless, he was an important influence on a number of younger English composers, including Edmund Rubbra, Michael Tippett and Benjamin Britten.

We present two of his rarely performed carols.

“Come, ye lofty, come ye lowly” takes its text from a hymn written in 1871 by Archer Thompson Gurney, a clergyman, poet, theologian and hymnodist. Holst’s treatment of it clearly shows a folk music origin. It was written in 1910 and included in a suite of carols for choir and orchestra called “Christmas Day”, along with well known carols by other composers such as “Good Christian men, rejoice”, “God rest ye merry, gentlemen” and “The First Noel”.

The second piece is his beautiful and simple setting of the medieval text “Jesu, Thou the Virgin born”, possibly dating back to the 6th century, telling of the birth and death of Christ. It alternates solo verses with a polyphonic chorus.

Christmas is Coming. Sir Henry Walford Davies was an English composer, organist, and educator. Born in 1869, he studied at the Royal College of Music and received his doctorate in music from Cambridge in 1898.

During his working life he occupied many important posts in the upper echelons of the music world, most notable of which was Master of the King’s Music from 1934 until 1941. Like Ord, he also served with the Royal Air Force during the First World War, but as Director of Music. After the war he also became music adviser to the BBC, for whom he gave commended talks on music between 1924 and 1941.

“Christmas is Coming” is a light-hearted setting of two anonymous traditional folk tunes, both of which point out the need to give to the poor at Christmas.

The traditional text of the first refers to the original wide use of a roast goose at Christmas dinner, rather than the nowadays ubiquitous turkey, which only became popular after WW2. The coins that the listener is asked to contribute date from before the 1971 decimalisation – a penny, a ha’p’ny (half penny) or a farthing (a “fourthing”, i.e. a quarter of a penny). The charity is to be given to the “old man” because before 1909, old people had no pension, so if they hadn’t been able to save, they would rely on charity to avoid the dreaded workhouse. In the second tune, “wassail” takes its origin from the Early English “waes hal” or “good health”. The Waits (see the notes on Boris Ord) went around the town “wassailing”, i.e wishing good health to the rich in return for a charitable offering.