This Worldes Joie

A night-time winter’s journey.

Hesperos’ Christmas concert this year takes the form of a search for home, refuge, good company, and the distilled winter-magic of the Christmas story. Placed among a constellation of carols, the first half of the programme is built around Arnold Bax’s setting of a twelfth-century poem which imagines the transience, and thus preciousness, of joys – ‘winter wakeneth all my care / Now these leaves waxeth bare’. Following the image of a traveller walking through the snow, we let them see glimmers of warmth. We will sing the famous Ukrainian carol (Carol of the Bells in its English version), but to its original words, which describe a swallow flying into a house at the new year. Marsh sets a poem which refracts winter inwards and outwards from a child’s bedroom, and the journey continues with a setting of Robert Frost – ‘The woods are lovely, dark, and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep / And miles to go before I sleep.’

The second half shimmers in a church window, with Poulenc’s Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël, four exquisite and vibrantly-coloured miniatures of different moments in the Christmas narrative. After Oliver Tarney’s gentle and lilting setting of Bululalow, this is paired with William Mundy’s beautiful Marian Vox Patris Caelestis, with its quotations from the Songs of Songs: ‘now the winter of earthly cold and misery has passed: flowers of eternal happiness and salvation have appeared […] Veni, veni, veni, caelesti gloria coronaberis’.

We look forward to seeing you all there. Drinks in the interval, and after the concert.

PROGRAMME

Peace on Earth — Errollyn Wallen

Shchedryk — Mykola Leontovych

This Worldes Joie — Arnold Bax

Deck the Halls — Traditional Welsh carol

Noël nouvelet — Traditional French carol, arr. Francis Jackson

In Winter's House — Joanna Marsh

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening — Eric Whitacre

Good King Wenceslas — Traditional

interval

Quatre motets pour le temps de Noël, FP 152 — Francis Poulenc

I. O magnum mysterium

II. Quem vidistis, pastores dicite

III. Videntes stellam

IV. Hodie Christus natus est

Vox patris caelestis — William Mundy

Balulalow — Oliver Tarney