News Britten’s Ceremony of Carols 09.01.2025

On the last Friday before the end of term, the Junior Chamber Choir and Senior Chamber Choir joined forces to give a remarkable performance of Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols in a beautifully-lit Bishop Centre. The choirs, numbering eighty voices in total, sang with real poise and exquisite musicianship, and were expertly accompanied by pupil harpists Olivia B, Giselle T and Meredith H. We are so very proud of all of them.

Mr Langworthy’s programme note is printed in full below:

Written for upper voices and harp, Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols was composed on a journey from America to England in May 1942. During a stop on this trip (in Nova Scotia, a Canadian province), Britten purchased ‘The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems’, and several of the poems within this book became Britten’s chief inspiration for A Ceremony of Carols. Many of the texts that you will hear this evening derive from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, although ‘Hodie Christus natus est’ is originally of Gregorian origin.

Such is its musical complexity and length, a complete performance of A Ceremony of Carols is seldom presented by schools or colleges. It is rarer, still, that such a performance should feature student harpists and, in the case of tonight’s performance, no fewer than three! My very grateful thanks to them (and a hearty ‘bravo’, too), and to our harp teacher, Miss Gabriella Jones, who has done so much to prepare our pupils for tonight’s performance.

My very grateful thanks to all of our choir directors, whether or not their choirs are performing this evening, and (of course) our wonderful singing teachers. Our choirs continue to flourish and grow (next term’s Spring Choral Concert will feature around two hundred performers), and I am hugely thankful to all of my colleagues for all that they do to promote choral music here.

Last, but by no means least, a final bravo to all of tonight’s performers, all of whom have simultaneously prepared for tonight’s performance alongside a vast array of repertoire for Monday’s A Festival of Lessons and Carols. It has been a real and sincere pleasure, for both me and Miss Edwards, to prepare this performance alongside them.