Sunday, December 11 is First Church’s Cantata Sunday, and the First Church Sanctuary Choir is excited to present one of the great choral works of Christmastide, Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols! This beautiful work features choir and soloists accompanied by a solo harp, and the music that will fill our sanctuary on Sunday will thrill and intrigue you. Join us in-person or online!
While being a classic of the repertoire, A Ceremony also is a very original composition, and not what you might usually expect to hear for a Christmas cantata – Britten joked about writing it because “one had to alleviate the boredom!” The lyrics are in Latin and Old English (taken from a book of poetry that Britten discovered in Nova Scotia, as he traveled by ship from America back home to England), and the text is sometimes humorous, sometimes dark, and in its entirety, delightful.
We are very lucky to have two incredible soprano soloists joining us, Danielle Reutter-Harrah and Tess Altiveros, as well as an amazing harpist, Alexis Odell! Friends from the Kirkland Choral Society are singing with us as well, having just performed this work for their Christmas concerts, and all will be led by Elisabeth Ellis, our Director of Music.
Jeremy Pound, of BBC Music Magazine, wrote this charming synopsis, further explaining the origins and details of Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols:
“What is Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols?
A Ceremony of Carols is an 11-movement work by the British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-76). Its text consists of an eclectic mix of anonymous medieval texts and later poems rather than familiar carols. Not all of the texts are festive, or even about winter – one of the carols, the Spring Carol, sings of ‘The deer in the dale, the sheep in the vale, the corn springing.’
When did Britten write A Ceremony of Carols?
Britten composed it in March to April 1942, while crossing the Atlantic on the Axel Johnson, a Swedish cargo ship, in the thick of the Second World War. At the time, the composer and his partner Peter Pears were heading back to Britain after a three-year stay in the US. According to Pears, their cabins were hot and stuffy, and the company on board ‘callow, foul-mouthed and witless’. Plus, of course, there was always the danger of being attacked by German U-Boat.
Why is it called a ‘Ceremony’?
The work begins and ends with a plainchant Procession and Recession that the choir enter and leave the stalls or concert hall to. The eighth movement, meanwhile, is an Interlude for the harp alone.
And where do the texts for A Ceremony of Carols come from?
Shortly after the Axel Johnson left the US, it docked briefly in Halifax, Nova Scotia. It was while browsing in a bookshop there that Britten found a copy of The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, compiled by Gerald Bullett. The poems in it fired his imagination to write a Christmas work.”
By Jeremy Pound Published: November 21, 2022