by Paul Matheson

Christmas’-The Gesualdo Six, Owain Park (Director) Hyperion CDA 68299

This generous (74 minutes) CD was recorded in Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge, in a setting which will have held for the singers very deep associations with their formative experience of singing Advent and Christmas church services year on year. As Owain Park says in the CD’s excellent accompanying booklet, ‘we all feel a certain magic when we revisit this repertoire towards the end of each year’.

In this recording The Gesualdo Six aspired to ‘capture something of the festive spirit, with moments of stillness set against joyful exuberance’. As one listens to the purity and sincerity of their six voices intertwined, it is like having an intimate Christmas service sung in one’s own home by the world’s finest choristers.

A festive service

The album’s musical programme is designed like a festive service. Medieval carols and plainchant alternate with Renaissance and more modern compositions: all expressing wonder at the mystical alchemy of God made man while remaining God; all contemplating the incomprehensible mystery of the eternal Godhead choosing to empty Himself to become incarnated as a fragile human child, in order to accomplish the work of redemption. For over a thousand years the composers and poets of Christmas have sought to convey the emotionally overwhelming spiritual revelation that He became more like us, so that we might become more like Him.

The programme begins with Veni Emmanuel, an advent hymn from the Middle Ages, originating in plainchant antiphons in the sung Latin Mass during the weeks before Christmas. It became very popular through its Victorian English translation as ‘O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’. Here it is sung in the original Latin, in Philip Lawson’s graceful arrangement.

Another medieval favourite here is Angelus ad Virginem, a popular carol that appeared in manuscripts from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century in England, France and Ireland. Sounding like a celestial fanfare, the gloriously ecstatic melody lifts our hearts as we hear the voices sing in resonant Latin the astonishing words:

‘When the angel came secretly to the virgin in her room,

soothing the maiden’s fear, he said: ‘Hail!

Hail, queen of virgins; while yet untouched by man

you shall conceive and bear the Lord of heaven and earth, salvation for mankind. You have become the gate of heaven’.

Gaudete (‘Rejoice’) is a carol related to the third Sunday of Advent, ‘Gaudete Sunday’. The song was first published in 1582 in a volume called Piae Cantiones. The movingly joyous and bright arrangement sung here by Brian Kay:

‘Gaudete, Christus est natus ex Maria Virgine!’ (‘Rejoice, Christ is born from the Virgin Mary!).

The 15th century English nativity carol There is No Rose is found in the Trinity Carol Roll, a parchment scroll over six feet long, which is the earliest source for English polyphonic carols. The roll contains words and music for thirteen carols in Middle English and Latin. Like so many medieval European carols, both the words and the melody of There is No Rose have a mystical quality, and indeed the carol describes the sacred mystery that ‘in this rose contained was Heaven and earth in little space’.

Paul Matheson is a diversity officer with the police