A Ceremony of Carols

Britten’s cycle of carols for children’s voices (although sometimes performed by women, as he originally envisaged) accompanied by harp, seems to perfectly capture the Christian joy at the birth of their Messiah. Framed by a processional and recessional on the plainchant “Hodie Christus natus est”, Britten’s musical settings of medieval and Renaissance texts mix exuberant part-songs with ones of ecstatic calm, and elsewhere strikingly contrast chilly winter imagery with playfulness. All the more remarkable, then, that he composed this masterpiece in the spring of 1942 while crossing the Atlantic from America back to wartorn England on a perilous voyage aboard the MS Axel Johnson. A Ceremony of Carols is one of Britten’s most self-consciously English works, with its medieval-style modal harmonies and effective use of canonic writing, whether in the exuberantly hectic “This Little Babe” or in the slowly rising, suitably cold Phrygian harmonies of “In Freezing Winter Night”, the chill further suggested by the harp’s “shivering” tremolandos.