Halifax, Nova Scotia, was where, in March 1942, the ship carrying Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears home from America docked before setting off on its perilous Atlantic crossing. Chance decreed that in a Halifax bookshop Britten would buy a copy of Gerald Bullett’s collection, The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, the mystical and evocative aura of some of the earliest texts immediately inspiring him – unfazed by U-boat activity – to set them to harp accompaniment. This element of serendipity in the emergence of A Ceremony of Carols, with its iconic evoking of medieval sensibilities and faith, perhaps helps define its enduring appeal.
Using the arrangement for mixed choir by composer/conductor Julius Harrison, the Britten was the focus of the Cardiff Polyphonic Choir’s Christmas celebration, under their conductor Thomas Blunt. Clearly, this was not the bright sheen of boys’ voices with which we’re more familiar, but the atmosphere and dramatic flow of the 11 movements was there, from the sopranos’ opening plainchant to the fading Alleluia in the final Recession. In the central carol, This Little Babe, the words of the 16th-century Catholic martyr Robert Southwell depict the Christ child as an angel come to avenge Satan: Blunt set a pace that allowed the fast, furious, rhythms to realise a wonderful momentum, the voices’ tight imitations then building tension towards the emphatic climax. The energy of this, together with the penultimate Deo Gracias, captured well the contrast with the radiant, lilting beauty of There Is No Rose and Balulalow, Elen Hydref’s harp playing always expressive.
The earlier part of the Polyphonic’s delightful programme had featured different composing traditions, given threads of connection through the repetition of key texts and the Alleluia refrains. Mendelssohn’s eight-part Advent and Christmas motets were paired with Gottfried Wolters’s setting of the pilgrimage song Maria durch ein Dornwald ging, where, as the Virgin Mary walks through a forest, thorn-trees blossom in her honour. The contemporary Hodie Christus natus est by the Slovenian Gašper Jereb echoed the contemplative feel of carols by John Rutter and Judith Weir.
Works by Welsh composers Alun Hoddinott and William Mathias, commissioned by the Polyphonic early in its six-decade history, were revisited here, the dancing gaiety of Mathias’s Sir Christèmas with Philip Aspden’s lively organ accompaniment ending appropriately with Nowell, Nowell, Nowell! delivered as shouts of joy.
