The Full Works Concert - Tuesday 23 December 2014, 8pm

Tonight, Catherine Bott goes up for a second helping of festive Full Works.

Christmas carol supremo John Rutter takes to the podium in tonight's concert to direct Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasy on Christmas Carols. First performed at the 1912 Three Choirs Festival at Hereford Cathedral, the work is a single movement which consists of the English folk carols, The truth sent from above, Come all you worthy gentlemen and On Christmas night all Christians sing, all folk songs collected in southern England by Vaughan Williams and his friend Cecil Sharp a few years earlier. These are interposed with brief orchestral quotations from other carols, such as The First Nowell.

Victor Hely-Hutchinson's Carol Symphony is based on four carols, given additional orchestration and arrangements. They are O Come All Ye Faithful in the style of a Bach chorale prelude; God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen in Russian mode; the third movement is based on the Coventry Carol, with a central interlude on The First Nowell; and the finale uses Here We Come A-Wassailing.

The 'Christmas' Concerto may well be the most famous example of Corelli's concerto grosso writing - in the Pastoral movement, he even used folk-like tunes, and sounds evoking bagpipes to conjure images of the Biblical shepherds attending the manger at the birth of Jesus.
 

Leopold Mozart: Sleigh Ride
Barry Wordsworth conducts the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra

Arcangelo Corelli: Concerto Grosso No.8 in G minor (‘Christmas Concerto’)
I Musici

Victor Hely-Hutchinson: A Carol Symphony
Gavin Sutherland conducts the City Prague Philharmonic Orchestra

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Fantasy on Christmas Carols
Baritone: Stephen Varcoe
John Rutter conducts the City of London Sinfonia & Cambridge Singers

Patric Standford: A Christmas Carol Symphony
Gavin Sutherland conducts the City Prague Philharmonic Orchestra

Christopher Rouse: Karolju
The Philharmonia Chorus
David Zinman conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra