DCD34331-CD

Gabriel Jackson: The Christmas Story

GLOBAL RELEASE DATE:
8 NOVEMBER 2024

Long associated with the music of Gabriel Jackson, in 2020 the Choir of Merton College, Oxford and their director Benjamin Nicholas won a BBC Music Magazine Award for their recording of The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, a work which grounded its narrative of Christ’s suffering and humanity’s redemption in texts associated with the history of the College.

The Christmas Story, again with a libretto assembled by the College’s chaplain the Revd Dr Simon Jones, takes the same approach to tell the story of Christ’s birth. Spanning the period from Advent to Candlemas, it mixes biblical narrative with liturgical texts and four specially commissioned poems by members of the College.

The new poems are given to the College’s girl choristers (an independent part of its choral foundation since 2016), while the main body of the work is carried by the full choir and by an ensemble of flute, percussion, strings, saxophone and three trombones – the latter recalling the hieratic sonorities of the seventeenth-century works by Schütz and others which Jackson had in mind while composing The Christmas Story.


Singing In Secret: Clandestine Catholic Music by William Byrd CD Delphian Records

PREVIEW

And they were in the same country

Apple Music Style Audio Player

You may also like ...

O Holy Night: A Merton Christmas

Gabriel Jackson: The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ

Gabriel Jackson: Beyond the Stars (Sacred Choral Works Vol II)

sleeper's prayer: Choral Music from North America

Subscribe