In this concert of festive music, famous names are intertwined with less well-known ones.
Elizabeth Poston, a stalwart yet unfamiliar English composer of the twentieth century, takes centre stage, with two settings of texts for Christmas. Poston studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams and had a very successful career as a composer and performer during the male-dominated era of post-war Britain.
Robert White, a prodigious talent who died young, is another unfamiliar name, especially when set against his more famous peer, Thomas Tallis. White’s Christe qui lux es et dies is his fourth setting of this text for Compline, and it must have therefore held a special appeal for him. Tallis and Gibbons, meat and drink for the singers of the Orlando Chamber Choir, provide contrasting settings of words celebrating the coming of Christ.
Franz Tunder was the father-in-law of the famous organist and composer Dietrich Buxtehude, and was a talented composer and musician in his own right. Director Oliver John Ruthven has arranged Tunder's motet Wachet auf! for choir and organ - it is a blueprint for the more extended cantatas written by Johann Sebastian Bach 70 years later and it uses the Lutheran hymn as its basis, much as Robert White uses the cantus firmus plainchant as the basis for Christe qui lux es et dies.
The programme is interspersed with audience carols, and we will serve wine and mince pies during the interval.
