Compline for Christmas invites you into a world of stillness, reflection and wonder. Inspired by the ancient night-time service of Compline, the VOCES8 Foundation Choir conducted by Barnaby Smith weaves plainchant, Renaissance polyphony, beloved Christmas music and readings together, exploring the mystery and atmosphere of the season.

At the heart of the sequence is Thomas Tallis’s Videte miraculum, an expansive meditation on the mystery of the Virgin birth and one of the great masterpieces of English Renaissance polyphony. Leading up to it are the Magnificat of Cristóbal de Morales and Orlando Gibbons’ Nunc dimittis, surrounded by music of J. S. Bach and Herbert Howells. Readings offer moments of reflection, with silence becoming part of the journey itself.

As the programme concludes, the ancient music of Michael Praetorius’s Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen mixes with Elizabeth Poston’s Jesus Christ the Apple Tree and with current composer-in-residence Taylor Scott Davis’s new work I Wait for Our Peace, bringing this contemplative Christmas celebration to a gentle close

Performers
VOCES8 Foundation Choir
Barnaby Smith Conductor