A Christmas Fantasia
The Joyful Company’s Christmas concert on 16 December includes classic seasonal works by Britten and Vaughan Williams as well as two world premières, plus traditional carols for choir, organ and audience.
Read on for details of our programmed works…
Most of the movements of A Ceremony of Carols were composed by Britten during the dangerous sea crossing of the Atlantic in 1942. The Swedish ship on which he and Peter Pears had obtained passage called in at Halifax, Nova Scotia, where the composer purchased a copy of The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, which seemed to spark the idea of the carol sequence, because five of the poems in the finished composition were contained in the anthology. The piece soon became an enormously popular addition to the repertoire of boys’ and women’s choirs. The composer as always writes with great understanding of both voices and the harp, in which the women of the JCS will be accompanied by Imogen Barford.
Peter Broadbent met the composer Paul Reade when he was invited to conduct the first performances of a children’s opera, David and Goliath, in 1975. The opera was a great success, and when planning a concert for his school choir, St. Angela’s Singers, which was to feature Britten’s piece, he commissioned Paul and the librettist of the opera, Jeremy Hornsby, to collaborate once again on a Cantata. Hornsby’s imaginative libretto had the named winds of the world being summonsed by King Aeolus, the mythological ruler of the winds. The three main winds are represented in the three choruses taken from the Cantata The Journey of the Winds. The vivid characterisation, melodic invention and economy are typical of this composer’s writing.
The first of the world premières is our second commission for Zoe Dixon, our Composer in Association, who has chosen to set the lovely mediaeval text I syng of a mayden that is makeless, which also appears in A Ceremony of Carols. This is a beautiful setting which captures the essence of the poem beautifully. The second première is an atmospheric and sensitive setting of words by William Blake: Sweet Dreams is by one of our singers, Jonathan Lane, whose assured choral writing has appeared in JCS programmes several times.
Our relationship with charities for the blind and partially sighted is continued in this concert, not only by featuring Zoe Dixon’s music, but also engaging the baritone Francis St. John and cellist Ivan R Deb who join the choir and organist Viktorija Goncharova in Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on Christmas Carols, concluding our celebrations of the 150th Anniversary of the composer’s birth.
We also feature the arrangement of the beautiful Ukrainian carol Sleep, Jesus, Sleep (Spy, Isuse, Spy) by composer and JCS Vice-President Roxanna Panufnik – all the proceeds from the sale of the piece go directly to the British Refugee Council to help refugees of all nationalities to find their feet here in the UK. We are proud that we are one of over 30 choirs who will be performing the carol this Christmas, and particularly delighted that we will accompanied in this work (and others in this concert) by Ukrainian organist Viktoria Goncharova, who has herself had to escape the Russian invasion.
Tickets for the performance are now on sale online for £15 (concessions £10: U30, unwaged) via this link (booking fee applies) and will be £20/£10 on the door at St Gabriel’s Church, Pimlico, SW1V 2AD.
Please download and share our Christmas concert flyer – we hope you can join us at 7pm on Friday 16th December!