We suggest five works to explore after Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols
Composing seasonal music in unlikely places evidently came naturally to Britten. Just as his A Ceremony of Carols was written on a cargo ship, his Hymn to the Virgin was the result of a spell in his school sickroom in his teens. Consisting of three verses in which unaccompanied choir and a group of soloists sing antiphonally in English and Latin, the work is a model of simple, reflective festive calm. (Choir of King’s College, Cambridge/Stephen Cleobury Decca 485 2504) More than 30 years before Britten’s Ceremony, Holst had turned to female voices and harp for the Third Group of his Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda. The words of the four hymns come from the vedas, the oldest body of Hindu sacred texts, in translations by the composer, who studied Sanskrit so he could read the originals. Touches of orientalism aside, his setting is imbued with an otherworldliness that foreshadows the wordless female chorus heard at the end of The Planets. (Holst Singers/Hilary Davan Wetton Hyperion 4880461) Brahms was not the biggest fan of the harp, rarely including it in his orchestral scores. He did, however, write the delightful Four Songs for Female Chorus, Harp and Two Horns, dating from when he was director of the Hamburg Women’s Choir in the 1860s. Including his only setting of Shakespeare, the cycle opens with Ruperti’s ‘The full sound of
