We recently performed our annual Christmas concert at St Barnabas Church in Wellingborough over two consecutive evenings, raising funds for The Lighthouse Centre. This year, our seasonal programme “A Choral Christmas” featured music from a range of genres and time periods, and we were accompanied by a wonderful orchestra.

As with any good Christmas concert, the evening began with obligatory audience participation in the singing of the traditional Christmas carol  “O, Little Town of Bethlehem”, before the choir performed the first of our Baroque pieces, Schütz’s cantata “The Christmas Story”. This was an extended piece made up of several short movements, and featured a number of solo and small group ensemble pieces, as well as three lively movements sung by the whole choir. The first half then ended with two modern carols; “Child in a Manger” and “Christmas Night” composed by the ever-popular John Rutter, and a performance of the well-loved carol “In the Bleak Midwinter”.

The choir began the second half of the concert with a performance of the hauntingly beautiful “Ubi Caritas”, an arrangement of a fourth century Latin chant composed in 2001 by Ola Gjeilo, which also featured a stunning version of Gjeilo’s original piano improvisation performed by our talented accompanist Richard Holloway. Next on the programme was the second of our Baroque pieces, Bach’s cantata “Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben” (“Heart and mouth and deed and life”) which we sang in German. In similar fashion to the Schütz performed earlier, this was a longer work composed of solo and whole choir elements, held together by recitatives (sung narratives) performed by Wyn Jones. The concert then closed with “O Come All Ye Faithful”, once again with the assistance of the audience.

As always, we could not have achieved such a successful sequence of concerts without the support and guidance of our musical director Jon Rees, and our co-director Helen Taylor, who kept us going with their encouragement and unfailing good humour (especially when  the Bach tied our tongues in knots on a regular basis!).

Helen Jones, Soprano