Gramophone Magazine
December 2024
Editor's Choice

The Choir of Merton College, Oxford, The Girl Choristers of Merton College, Oxford, Oxford Contemporary Sinfonia, François Cloete
Benjamin Nicholas

Long associated with the music of Gabriel Jackson, in 2020 the Choir of Merton College, Oxford and their director Benjamin Nicholas won a BBC Music Magazine Award for their recording of The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ, a work which grounded its narrative of Christ's su ering and humanity's redemption in texts associated with the history of the College. The Christmas Story, again with a libretto assembled by the College's chaplain the Revd Dr Simon Jones, takes the same approach to tell the story of Christ's birth. Spanning the period from Advent to Candlemas, it mixes biblical narrative with liturgical texts and four specially commissioned poems by members of the College.

The new poems are given to the College's girl choristers (an independent part of its choral foundation since 2016), while the main body of the work is carried by the full choir and by an ensemble of ute, percussion, strings, saxophone and three trombones - the latter recalling the hieratic sonorities of the seventeenth-century works by Schutz and others which Jackson had in mind while composing The Christmas Story.