First, the first part of the Christmas Oratorio, conducted by Peter Schreier. This is a performance on modern instruments, but with amazing trumpets and drums (crucial for Christmas morning) and finishing up with the bass singing of Robert Holl, duetting with trumpet.
Next, the Messiah, performed by English Concert and Trevor Pinnock. It’s an obvious Christmas choice, but which part to choose? The Nativity scene: pastoral symphony, treble singing of shepherds, the chorus gloryifying God and soprano rejoicing.
Britten’s Ceremony of Carols is a great 20th century masterpiece and a very approachable one, full of beautiful tunes. A transcendent harp part, boys voices in harmony (the breathtaking round This little babe) and as soloists (heartbreaking This Yonge Childe and Balulow). Listen to it all.
In the bleak midwinter, Neville Marriner. This is my only carol record, singing one verse (Rosemary Joshua sings another, beautifully). Christmas mortification for me though: my family will laugh at my ludicrous over-enunciation of “a brrreast fulllll of millllk and a cradle fulllll of hay”.
And to end, “Will you see the infancy” from Finzi’s Dies Natalis. I’m singing this, so I’ll leave the room, but it is a marvellous setting of Traherne’s mystical consideration of Christ’s nativity bound together with Wordsworthian intimations of immortality.
Schubert’s Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession by Ian Bostridge is published by Faber & Faber on 1 January 2015.
