In the autumn of 2025, Bergen Cathedral Choir will travel to London to learn more about British choral music. What could be more fitting, then, than a British theme for this year’s Christmas repertoire?
On Sunday, 14 December, the choir will perform its traditional pre-Christmas concert in the Cathedral, this year featuring British Christmas music. Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols (1942) is at the heart of the program, a work that brings familiar and cherished Christmas spirit to many, not least the women of the Cathedral Choir. They will be accompanied by Marija Kadovic on harp. Women also take a central role throughout the rest of the concert, albeit more indirectly: aside from Britten, all the music performed on this Advent Sunday has been written or arranged by women, primarily living British composers.
The Christ child has a natural place in these songs, but so do blossoming metaphors in the winter chill, as in There is no rose and Jesus Christ the Apple Tree. Winter’s stillness is evoked in pieces like In the Stillness and The Quiet Heart, while church music is celebrated through Britten’s Hymn to St. Cecilia – the patron saint of church music. And although the men of the choir sing about being “In Winter’s House,” and the darkness of the Lucia season can feel enveloping, we are reminded that the Christ child is on the way and that “The darkness is no darkness.”
Bergen Cathedral Choir welcomes you to a pre-Christmas concert featuring both well-known and lesser-known gems of British Christmas music
Bergen Cathedral Choir
Marija Kadovic, harp
Kjetil Almenning, conductor