O Holy Night

The world surely does not need another disc of Christmas music. When it became apparent that we might move forward with this LCS recording, I set out to find just about anything to record that was not Christmas repertoire. Despite this, and despite many hours of trawling through shelves of sheet music and CD catalogues, I kept coming back to the idea of compiling a slightly unusual and thought-provoking selection of exceptional Christmas music. It is a well-supplied area of recorded classical music, but one which I believe has a perfectly-sized gap for this recording.

The framework for the programme comes from the five traditional carols. Anyone who has ever sung a note of choral music or attended a carol concert around Christmas will be familiar with outstanding arrangements and descants by David Willcocks. My view is that recording these great carols has been somewhat overlooked by the finest professional choirs in favour of more erudite and virtuosic Christmas repertoire. They are synonymous with Christmas for so many of us and deserve tobe recorded at the very highest level. Andrew Carter’s electric arrangement of the advent carol O come, O come, Emmanuel still sends shivers down my spine, and is a worthy companion to the Willcocks legacy.

A similarly worthy companion is Max Pappenheim’s technicolour arrangement of Lo, He come with clouds descending. Max was Organ Scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, and it was for the choir here he wrote and dedicated this arrangement. He and I overlapped there for just one year, but it was a year of great friendship and music making. Max’s arrangement was first performed at the 2006 Advent Carol Service, and has been included every subsequent year to date.

I approached Max about writing an arrangement of O Holy Night – by far my favourite carol – a few years later. The arrangement he produced (and recorded on this disc) far exceeded anything I could have hoped for. We discussed at length whether the climax – the top A for the soloist towards the very end of the piece – should be loud and dramatic, or hushed and mysterious. In the end we decided to have both, one after another!

Interspersed between the five carols is a selection of pieces I have collected over many years involved with numerous different choirs and many dozens of carol services and concerts along the way. Sir Christèmas and Adam Lay Ybounden will be known to many, but the rest, I believe, deserve to be better known. There is a mixture of works, from the less technically-demanding to the more virtuosic and challenging. I hope this selection may inspire, and offer welcomed discoveries to all listeners.

Michael Waldron