Our next concert has a festive ring to it! It features Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols in a setting for all four voices rather than treble voices alone. Britten and Pears had been in America but in 1942, despite the hazards of the journey in wartime, decided to return to England. They boarded the M.S. Axel Johnson, a Swedish cargo vessel, and the ship stopped briefly at Halifax in Nova Scotia. There Britten came across an anthology of mediaeval poetry in a secondhand-bookshop. It was called, The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems. He spent long hours in his cabin on the journey home and began work on setting some of the poems for voices and harp. As Sally Pryce, the harpist, says, “Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a performance of it”.
But our concert is much richer than Britten alone. As is our trademark, we have a wide variety of music in many different styles but all united by the theme of carolling. And the audience too will have a chance to join in some of the well-loved Christmas carols. So come and hear not only Britten but William Byrd, Amy Beach, Leonard Cohen and many more.
