Our well attended Advent and Christmas carols services brought some new music for me to sing. We made a dramatic entrance at Advent singing ‘Unborn’, the opening of Alec Roth’s oratorio The Traveller. Not often you get a text in Pāli at an Advent carol service!
At Christmas, we learned René Clausen’s Tonight eternity alone, with its vertiginous soprano duet – not explicitly about Christmas night, but the words are appropriate to it. We also had two home-grown pieces. A setting for double choir of Silent Night in English and German (with a bit of The First Nowell thrown in) commemorated the informal Christmas truce of 1914. Our organist set the Shepherd’s Masque a few years ago: a text I hadn’t previously encountered about Jolly Wat the shepherd boy, who offers baby Jesus everything – even his tar box!