“Christmas Isn’t Only Carols”: Making space for the music we’ve been waiting to hear all year.

I’ve never been one for using anniversaries, or moments in the calendar, for prompting my listening – of course, concert and opera programmers have been relying on these Red Letter occasions for years, and so it’s often unavoidable. And to be fair, it has occasionally turned up some long-forgotten gems (the 50th anniversary of the death of the multi-talented George Enescu in 2005 was a real opportunity for discovery). When the pandemic hit in 2020 and robbed us of dozens of Beethoven symphony cycles and retrospectives – it was the 250th anniversary of his birth – we were any the poorer? Probably not: if there’s one composer who needs no special pleading it’s the great LvB! But, for me, any day of the year would be perfect for Bach’s St Matthew Passion or Handel’s Messiah.

With the precision of a Swiss watch, Christmas comes round every year and inspires hours of tightly focused, and very specific, music-making that will not be heard for the rest of the year. As an Englishman, the most quintessential Christmas music-making for me are the services from King’s College, Cambridge. There are few things that evoke such a deep response as hearing carols and hymns sung by this most distinctive of choirs, interspersed with biblical readings, and with the occasional modern take on an ancient tradition. Nothing says Christmas more potently than a cup of tea, a mince pie and the sound of the voices, the boys providing a halo to the sound, swirling around that extraordinary and unmistakable acoustic.

I’ve never cared for Christmas albums, with a couple of rather grand exceptions – Leontyne Price’s glorious Decca recording with the Vienna Philharmonic and Herbert von Karajan from 1960, and another Decca recording – or rather a single track from it – Joan Sutherland’s rendition of Douglas Gamley’s uber-camp and amazingly inventive setting of “The Twelve Days of Christmas’ (a track, by the way, that anyone defending the oft-voiced criticism of La Stupenda’s diction should reach for – it’s like cut glass!). 

For me, Christmas’s customary indulgence usually spills over into my listening and viewing, making it a time to renew acquaintance with old music friends, like Puccini’s La Bohème (which, of course, does have an act set at Christmastime). It’s one of those operas that is virtually director proof (though Claus Guth’s Opéra de Paris production, set on a space station on the moon certainly stretched the original premise to breaking point, despite the power of the vocal performances, particularly Nicole Car’s beautifully gauged Mimì). At the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, John Copley’s production of La Bohème, in sets by Julia Trevelyan Oman, unveiled in 1974 and kept in the repertoire for decades, became an old friend, and a perfect frame for some of the great pairings of our age – Ricciarelli, Tokody, Freni, Cotrubas, Te Kanawa, Döse among the Mimìs and Domingo, Carreras, Pavarotti, Lima, Luchetti, Aragall among the Rodolfos. The sets were breathtaking, and somehow Christmas came to Covent Garden whenever it was revived. (medici.tv offers an impressive selection of productions of La Bohème, including Brian Large’s 1988 filmed version with Mirella Freni and Luciano Pavarotti.)

What Christmas does give us, and which is unique to the calendar, is time, perhaps one of the most precious commodities of our modern age. And what better way to fill those days of downtime than listening to or watching music? Perhaps that Ring Cycle you’ve long promised yourself, or a Mahler cycle in chronological order? I’ve always liked setting myself the challenge of listening to a series of works that only time can indulge – the 16 string quartets by Beethoven make a manageable grouping and the journey you are taken on is immense in terms of what four string instruments can express, and how one man can use such a medium to explore the outer reaches of spirituality that we, as humans, are given the sensitivity to probe. (Bruce Adolphe gives a fascinating introduction to Op. 131 with members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center as part of their ‘Inside Chamber Music’ series in New York, and prefaces the work in a film here. An equally fascinating response, also on medici.tv, finds the choreographer Hans van Manen giving us a dance interpretation to Beethoven’s knotty Grosse Fuge with Netherlands National Ballet – see below.)

So, for me, Christmas won’t only be carols and seasonal songs – unavoidable unless you’re a hermit! – but it’ll be music I’ve been waiting to devote some time to, catching up with some of the most enticing releases of the year, or one of those very long operas that requires considerable planning to fit into the regular schedule. And the anniversaries of 2026 do at least take us a little way off the beaten path with György Kurtág and Betsy Jolas notching up their 100th birthdays, Steve Reich his 90th, and among those no longer with us, Engelbert Humperdinck (175th), a chance to sample something other than Hänsel und Gretel, and Ottorino Respighi (150th), maybe one of the operas? And going further back into the mists of time, Louis Couperin and John Dowland (both 400th). Maybe I’ll steal a march on the concerts those birthdays will provoke…