ON Christmas night

This album feels like a significant milestone on many levels, and one I am particularly proud of. It will be the twelfth album release for LCS, which puts us level with Taylor Swift as of December 2025, and as our second Christmas album, technically now puts us one ahead of Taylor. This release also coincides with the LCS’s 10th Anniversary, and provides a nice link to our very first album, O Holy Night.

I opened my welcome notes to O Holy Night by proclaiming “The world surely does not need another album of Christmas music”, and so now feel especially bound to justify why we’re back doing it again.

O Holy Night (of which I remain extremely proud), is a carefully-chosen selection of many lesser-known carols, with five traditional ‘congregational’ carols (and their ubiquitous descants) interspersed. There is a clear framework, with the listener being introduced to more unusual – mostly a capella – choral works, around which the big well-known carols act as signposts along the way. I’m pleased to say it remains extremely popular to this day.

On Christmas Night comes from a very different angle. This album is full of well-known Christmas titles and melodies, but nearly all in new and interesting arrangements. Ding Dong! Merrily on High, Silent Night, and Away in a Manger all appear as premiere recordings of new arrangements – and new imaginings – of these much-loved Christmas melodies.

Our collaboration with the composer Owain Park has been long and fruitful. As composer-in-residence, LCS has commissioned several orchestrations and arrangements from Owain over the years, many of which have become mainstays of our of annual appearance at the Sinfonia Smith Square Christmas Festival, and are firm favourites of audiences and performers alike. I’m delighted many of these appear on this album: I hope his skilful arrangements for chamber orchestra will not only give joy to the listener, but also more options to other groups at Christmas when full symphonic forces may not be available.

The Christmas Suite of Alec Rowley is a little gem and is always well-received by audiences, allowing the strings to take the spotlight in a conscious nod to the LCS orchestra, which did not feature on O Holy Night.

It wouldn’t be an LCS project without a couple of curveballs and something completely new. I’m delighted to say that LCS has commissioned the orchestration for Jim Clements’ symphonic-scaled Awake, Glad Heart!, a piece I first heard in its original version for choir and organ on my gap year. A suitably high-energy and rousing conclusion to the tracklist is provided by Iain Farrington’s toe-tapping Nova, nova.

The final nod goes to my desert island Christmas track, O Holy Night. As the title track of the first LCS album, it appears there in a specially-commissioned, technicolour arrangement by Max Pappenheim. It is fitting, therefore, that Owain Park has orchestrated it for this album, to even greater technicolour splendour.

I hope there’s something timeless and yet fresh about everything on this disc, and I also hope it’s a recording people will enjoy coming back to each festive season. Who knows, maybe we’ll end up with as many streams as Taylor…

Michael Waldron

Related to the French word ‘carole’, meaning a courtly or popular medieval dance song, the English term ‘carol’ dates from the same period and is associated above all with Christmas – though occasionally other festivities could be celebrated. Early examples often concern themselves primarily with either the Virgin Mary or other saints connected to the feast of the Nativity.

The sheer number of these carols, from many countries, is vast. The best-known examples are widely known and sung – not least during carol services or concerts enjoyed by congregations or audiences around Christmas itself. As with so many choirs, the London Choral Sinfonia gives extremely popular annual carol concerts, often incorporating new pieces, or new arrangements of old favourites.

Some of the pieces on this disc therefore are new, others old, a few ancient, with several creative figures from different periods involved in their complex paths to their present forms.

The text of Ring Out, Wild Bells comes from Tennyson’s extended poem In Memoriam (1850), written as a threnody for his beloved friend and his sister’s fiancé, Arthur Hallam, who had died in 1833 at the age of 22. This particular section is essentially a celebration of New Year, the ringing of the bells marking the ending of the old and the beginning of the new.

The 1914 setting by Percy Fletcher (1879-1932) – a composer best known for his brass band music – is scored for SATB choir and organ with optional bells. It has been orchestrated by the multitalented Owain Park (born 1993) – singer, conductor and currently composer-in-residence to the London Choral Sinfonia – for two trumpets, timpani, percussion, piano, organ and strings: Park has dedicated his thrilling arrangement to the LCS and its artistic director Michael Waldron.

Born in 1983, Jim Clements is another contemporary figure of many talents: baritone, composer, arranger, and orchestrator, he has already left a considerable mark on musical life in the UK and much further afield.

Originally written in 2007 for the Choir of Worcester Cathedral under their then organist and master of the choristers, Adrian Lucas, Awake, Glad Heart! sets the text Christ’s Nativity by the Welsh Metaphysical poet Henry Vaughan (1621-1695), taken from his collection Silex Scintillans [Sparks from the Flint – meaning the human heart] or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (1650). In the present luminous version Clements has expanded the scoring which now matches the same forces as Park’s Fletcher arrangement. Emma Bell provides the soprano solo.

One of the best known of all carols – the total number of its recordings supposedly exceeds 137,000 – Silent Night was produced in the Austrian village of Oberndorf bei Salzburg and first performed there in the local church on Christmas Eve 1818.

A priest, Father Joseph Mohr, had written the text two years earlier; he asked schoolteacher and choirmaster Franz Xaver Gruber (1787-1863) to set it for voice and guitar following the loss of the church’s organ in a flood. In its utter simplicity, the carol has proved irresistible ever since.

The translator of the text, incidentally, is unknown. The masterly choral specialist Bob Chilcott’s arrangement is for choir and strings.

A more recent but hugely popular creation is the song Walking in the Air from the animated film The Snowman (1982), drawn from the 1978 children’s book of the same title by Raymond Briggs: its original (uncredited) performer was the then treble, now tenor, Peter Auty. Malakai Bayoh, a leading British treble soloist of our time, sings here.

The film was scored by Howard Blake (born 1938), who has composed numerous works in many genres throughout his varied career. Versions for concert hall and theatre have followed, while his ballet score of the same name, first produced in 1993, has also gone on to become a regular Christmas favourite. The highly atmospheric arrangement we hear was made by the composer in 1984 and represents Blake’s Op.335a; the lyrics are the composer’s own.

In the Bleak Midwinter is a text by the 19th-century poet Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) that first appeared in the American literary monthly Scribner’s Magazine in January 1872 under the title A Christmas Carol. As with many such texts, there are various musical settings, of which two are almost rivals for popularity: one by Gustav Holst and the other, found on the present disc, by Harold Darke (1888-1976), a composer and organist who made a significant contribution to the Anglican choral tradition.

Made in 1909, Darke’s setting – a regular in the Nine Lessons and Carols Service broadcast each Christmas from King’s College, Cambridge – was voted the finest Christmas Carol of all time in a poll of choral experts and choirmasters organised by BBC Music Magazine in 2008.

A widely gifted musician, Alec Rowley (1892-1958) is remembered primarily for his educational piano music, formerly much played by younger students; but his catalogue of works includes larger and more serious works, as well as the lightweight and attractive Christmas Suite for Strings dating from 1930.

Each of its movements is based on a folk carol: the Prelude on The Bitter Withy; the Siciliana on The Holly and the Ivy; the Minuet on The Holly and the Ivy and The Cherry Tree Carol; the Sarabande on The Coventry Carol; the Bourrée on On Christmas Night and The Moon Shines Bright; the Fughetta on The Little Room, while the Finale is a melange of no fewer than five pieces: Good Christian Men, Rejoice, What Child is This?, The Wassail Song, Good King Wenceslas and God rest you merry, Gentlemen.

Impressive is Christmas Day – a Fantasy on Christmas Carols by Gustav Holst (1874-1934) which we hear in an arrangement by Owain Park. The carol heard in its opening section has an unusually long and complex history.

Its origins lie in a 14th-century Latin and German macaronic carol entitled In dulci jubilo, whose text is ascribed to the mystical German Heinrich Seuse, also known as Henry Suso (1295-1366); the tune, which first appears in print around 1400, may well indeed be older. The English text we hear, penned by J. M. Neale, dates from 1853, some four and a half centuries later.

Gustav Holst opens his 1910 medley for chorus and orchestra with this ancient melody, following up with God rest you merry, Gentlemen; Good Christian Men, Rejoice; Come ye Lofty, come ye Lowly (Holst identifies this as an ‘antica melodia Bretone’ – an ancient Breton melody); and The First Nowell, some of these heard in combination. Owain Park’s 2018 arrangement is again dedicated to Michael Waldron and the LCS.

A standard of the Christmas carol repertoire is Away in a Manger, though on this occasion we hear the familiar words sung to a less familiar melody.

The text is both American and traditional, first appearing in 1895 in a setting by the American James Ramsey Murray (1841-1905), also the composer of popular song books for Sunday and other schools. The delicate arrangement for SATB choir and strings is the work of Bob Chilcott.

Many gifted individuals are involved the creation of the LCS version of the popular, aria-like O Holy Night. Its original French text, entitled Cantique de Noël, is by the poet Placide Cappeau and dates from the year 1847; it begins with the words Minuit, chrétiens (Midnight, Christians).

Best known for his score to the ballet Giselle – though also responsible for a host of operas both serious and comic that enjoyed success in his day – the composer Adolphe Adam (1803-1856) set it to music that same year: yet strangely, the French text acquired a controversial reputation and at various times has been banned on religious grounds.

The familiar English equivalent – a new version (1855), rather than a translation – is the work of the American music critic John Sullivan Dwight. In this form the piece has been widely performed and recorded by singers from a huge variety of vocal traditions – on this disc by the great soprano Emma Bell.

The expansive arrangement we hear is by the sound designer and composer Max Pappenheim, best known for his work in the theatre, re-orchestrated with additional strings and percussion by Owain Park.

The original tune of Ding Dong! Merrily on High is a secular French melody published by Thoinot Arbeau, anagrammatic pseudonym of Jehan Tabouret, in his 1589 dance manual, Orchésographie: its title therein was Branle de l’Official – the ‘branle’ being a French medieval dance.

The words were added by the English composer George Ratcliffe Woodward and published together with the melody in his Cambridge Carol Book in 1924; Charles Wood supplied the harmony for this publication.

Well versed in choral music as music director of the world-famous Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square, the versatile American musician Mack Willberg (born 1955) later created his own delightful version, given a new orchestration here by Owain Park.

Last but not least in this festive collection is a work by another figure in UK music whose interests are exceptionally wide. Pianist, organist, composer, arranger and musicologist, Iain Farrington was born in 1977.

His carol Nova, nova takes a 15th-century English text based on a passage from St Luke’s Gospel describing the annunciation, when the Archangel Gabriel tells the Virgin Mary the nature of the child she is to bear. The Latin title refers to the refrain ‘Nova! Nova! Ave fixit ex eva’ (News! News! ‘Ave’ has been made from ‘Eva’!) attached to the ancient version of the text.

As the composer himself says, the piece ‘is jazz influenced with its bluesy harmonic inflections, rhythmic drive, percussive effects, and exuberant energy. In the final section, the mood becomes openly joyful and breaks out into a scene of celebration.’

Commissioned by the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, the toe-tapping result was first performed in November 2022 under Andrew Nethsingha; LCS later commissioned the current version for chamber orchestra, strings and percussion.

© George Hall