T
he beginning of Advent is heralded by Bach’s cantata Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, performed at various points during the Eucharist on Advent Sunday. Music by Bach’s almost exact contemporary, Handel, features heavily throughout the month: most of the relevant numbers from Messiah are included in our services. Another thread running through Advent is the set of ‘Great O’ Antiphons — the source of the hymn O come, O come, Emmanuel.
At the Choral Eucharist, the Agnus Dei settings are all by nineteenth-century French composers (Dubois, Gounod, J-B Fauré, Délibes).. The Kyries, meanwhile, are largely in a rather more austere English style (Blow, Child, Gibbons, Tallis), and the Sanctus is sung to four plainsong settings. The Feast of the Nativity itself is celebrated with Charpentier’s arrangement of French carols in Mass form, the Messe de minuit pour Noël, and with Kodály’s jubilant Missa brevis. For the two Choral Eucharists of Christmas, we welcome back James Sherlock as organist.
Of the other music this month, there are, among the old favourites, several outstanding lesser-known works. Judith Weir’s Ascending into Heaven makes a welcome return at the Advent Carol Service, alongside Arvo Pärt’s setting of the Orthodox Ave Maria text. I am composing (at the time of writing — I trust that by the second of December it will be finished) a setting of lines from Virgil’s Eclogue IV interspersed with Biblical prophecy, Iam nova progenies, for inclusion in the same service. At Evening Prayer on the sixth, the Junior Choir sing the traditional Russian children’s song for St Nicholas, O, khto, khto; on the thirteenth, they honour the year’s midnight with the Neapolitan hymn Santa Lucia.
I am sorry to announce that I couldn’t resist the temptation to programme music by Jean-Baptiste Fauré on the Sunday in Advent in which John the Baptist is commemmorated. On the evening of the sixteenth, the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols includes two rousing Spanish carols of the late Renaissance, as well as an exquisite lullaby by Martin Peerson, Upon my lap my Sovereign sits, and Peter Maxwell Davies’ emotive setting of words by Rowan Williams, Advent Calendar. The following week, Evensong is replaced (at the normal time of 4.30 p.m.) by a Sequence for the last Sunday in Advent: Will Todd’s My Lord has come plays on the Advent call of Maranatha (which, depending on how one is given to understand it, means either ‘Come, Lord’, or ‘Our Lord has come’), and Byrd’s Descendit de cœlis is an extraordinary metaphysical meditation on the Incarnation: “He entered our world through the ear of the Virgin.”