December 13, 2011
Christmas by Candlelight
A delicious and perfectly formed short concert of seasonally themed choral works, mostly sung by the wonderful Jubilate! Choir. Keble College Chapel, in all its vastness and gloriousness, looked particularly lovely lit only by hundreds of tea-lights, flickering and wavering in the winter gloom. The concert followed a more traditional format this year, with readings from the Bible (not all New Testament, which was nice, although the old Biblical parataxis recalled unfortunate echoes of Monty Python and the Holy Grail) and opened with the Jubilate choir singing a new piece, The Light of the World by Simon Whalley, actually in the chapel where Keble’s copy of that celebrated painting hangs; a slightly muted but beautiful beginning.With William Harris’s anthem "Strengthen ye the weak hands" the choir emerged into the main chapel before the altar, and began to use the magical instrument that is the entire building as it should be used - exquisite harmonies building from subtle precision to awesome, full –throated climax, which filled the vast spaces of the roof and continued to roll through the air for a full two or three second after the singers had shut their mouths.
The first part of the programme was a very much German, with works by Bach, Brahms and Praetorius, glorious chorales alternating with organ preludes on Keble’s wonderfully mellow new organ. The singing was as miraculously precise as we have come to expect from this excellent choir, and it was fascinating to watch Simon Whalley conducting rather as if he were cooking, appearing to fold the voices into the air with his hands. Particularly with the soprano-only Blessed Virgin’s cradle Song by Edward Bairstow, the sound is so divinely beautiful that it literally does make your hair stand on end; an angelic resonance.
There was no interval this year, so the whole concert seemed much shorter and we barely had time to feel hungry before we were out in the icy crystalline air, dazed by an hour and twenty minutes of exquisite beauty rolling around the vault of your skull in memory as it just had the vault of the chapel roof.
The final piece, Holst’s version of the beautiful medieval carol "This have I done for my true love", was simply magical, evoking ancient folk music, the Song of Songs, the midwinter festivals as well as the Christian celebrations of many years ago in an almost atavistic way. It had that numinous sense of imminence – wonderful truths that are just beyond your perceptions and made you want to howl like a wolf.
This is a one-off concert before Christmas, but the choir does perform regularly in Oxford– March 17th is the next one. Definitely worth leaving your cosy fireside for.