Somehow I’d managed to miss doing more than odd movements of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Apart from the first chorus in isolation in a New Cambridge Singers December concert many years ago, and the chorale which turns up in Carols for Choirs, it was new to me, if not to most others in Gloucester Choral Society which performs it every three years. I’m not even very familiar with it from broadcasts.
The Nativity – cloister window, Gloucester Cathedral
Our rehearsal conditions were not the easiest, as for several rehearsals we were divided into single voice parts and generally rehearsed without accompaniment. This ensured that everyone could meet every week for an hour in the small numbers enforced by spacing. (While the Cathedral nave has plenty of physical space, the echo makes life very difficult if there are too many singers.) Sight-singing the trickier parts of the Christmas Oratorio under these conditions – I had missed the first rehearsal which was a sing-through with the whole choir present – with no other voices or accompaniment to hide behind, was a real challenge, but perhaps that was part of the point. When it came to the performance many in the choir opted out so we were a significantly smaller group than usual, and we used more baroque phrasing than in the last performance I gave of Bach with this choir. Our orchestra was the Corelli Orchestra, who brought their panoply of oboes back with them.
Despite being largely arranged from other, often secular works, it is a charming piece with a variety of jubilant and more reflective moods, and the Lutheran emphasis on personal devotion giving it a more inward-looking feeling than much Christmas music; this may explain the subdued (especially from a soprano point of view) ending. For the record, we sang parts 1, 2, 3 and 6 which I believe is the standard selection although the previous Gloucester performance replaced 2 and 3 with 4 and 5.