SCO Chorus Christmas Concert
Greyfriars Kirk, 22/12/2025
SCO Chorus, Gregory Batsleer, director
I was privileged to attend the Christmas choral concert given by the SCO Chorus, under their director, Gregory Batsleer, in the beautiful surroundings of Greyfriars Kirk in a programme of wintry music on Monday 22nd, the second of two concerts on consecutive evenings in Christmas week.
I haven’t heard the Chorus for some time, and I must say that I was bowled over by their superb performance on Monday. The choral tradition in Edinburgh is rich and long-lasting, with the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, the Bach Choir and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus all producing top quality amateur choirs throughout the years, with fine directors guiding them, but I think we are particularly well-served at the moment. It’s slightly ironic, in an era when choirs throughout Britain are struggling to find members, especially men, that Edinburgh somehow bucks the trend.
All the better for us, the audience. Tonight’s programme, on paper somewhat challenging with the accent on 20th and indeed 21st century music, was a triumph. The main part of the church from east to west was full (I assume the case was the same on Sunday evening), and there was a definite sense of anticipation amongst the assembled listeners.
Benjamin Britten’s ‘A Ceremony of Carols’ was the first and most weighty part of the programme, and from the opening processional, we were assured of a fine performance, as the ladies of the choir glided down the nave singing “Hodie Christus natus est - Alleluia!” The work was composed in 1942 when Britten and Peter Pears were sailing back to war-torn Britain after some time in the USA. Britten had picked up a copy of the English Galaxy of Shorter Poems in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and this selection of mainly Middle English poems turned his mind to musical settings. The unrelated songs of the original conception soon turned into a unified work, framed with a processional and recessional use of the plainchant, Hodie Christus Natus Est (Today, Christ is born), and anchored by a solo harp, which has a solo itself halfway through, based on the same plainchant. Scored for a 3 part children’s choir, it was later re-scored for mixed choir; what we heard in Greyfriars was the original high voiced version, but with adults, and it worked really well. There are several solo passages, and all were sung with accuracy, precision and beautiful tone by Anna Morris, Florence Kaiser and Lorna Htet-Khin. Various solo passages occurred throughout the concert, all sung with confidence and style by members of the choir – it is a very good sign if solos from within any choir sound like professional singers, and the warmth of the soprano (and alto) sections was notable all evening.
The harp was played impeccably by Eleanor Hudson, formerly Principal Harp with the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and now harp tutor at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and the whole piece was sympathetically conducted by Gregory Batsleer. I worked with Sir Peter Pears back at the beginning of my singing career and love the work that he and Britten produced together in their long partnership. I had never heard the Ceremony of Carols before, and I am delighted to have come across it now.
I first met the baritone, Roderick Williams, when we sang Swallow and Ned Keene in a concert performance of Britten’s ‘Peter Grimes’ with Sir Richard Hickox many years ago, and I have watched his career ever since with admiration. I knew he was also a composer, and it was his ‘O Adonai, et Dux Domus Israel’ from around the time of that ‘Grimes,’ in 1997, that was the next piece in the programme. Written for the choir, Ex Cathedra, it was designed to exploit the large spaces found in a church setting, and various members of the SCO Chorus were placed at different points throughout Greyfriars. A solo soprano, Nicola Henderson, opens the piece and Williams adds multiple layers as the work proceeds. We eventually hear the tenors and basses of the chorus, and there is a solo tenor celebrant, Michael Scanlon, to add to the mix. As the piece progresses, the solo soprano climbs higher into the stratosphere with clarion accuracy in a cry for redemption.
Some audience members who I chatted to were less convinced by the piece, but I must say that I found it extremely moving and enjoyed its complexity.
The whole chorus reassembled at the east end for a performance of Thomas Tallis’s wonderful motet ‘Videte Miraculum’, written in 1575. I have listened to this piece frequently on disc for decades, but have rarely heard it live, and the Chorus sang it perfectly. The full range of the tenors and basses added a whole new element to the aural experience of the evening, and again, like their higher voiced colleagues, their homogenous and well-measured singing was a treat. Tallis was a real genius, and his command over vocal harmony was total. Somehow his music just sounds right, as if no note he wrote could ever be out of place, and in a major work like Videte Miraculum, the result is sublime. The text, the Responsory for Candlemas, is rather odd for a non-believer, dealing with Mary’s excellence as a virgin, knowing she is “a mother but not a wife”, but the clear tenderness of the vocal lines are testament to Tallis’s Marian devotion. The plainchant sections were delivered by the men in fine style, and the warm acoustic of Greyfriars was perfect for this most perfect of composers.
We returned to the present rather dramatically with the World Premiere of a piece by the young Scottish composer, Jay Capperauld. Born in 1989, in East Ayrshire, he is rapidly becoming the star of a new generation of composers with a particularly Scottish voice. Appointed Associate Composer with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra in 2022, he has written several works for the orchestra, and this new work for the Chorus was very well-received. I come from a generation of music lovers for whom the idea of sitting through any world premiere was a necessary evil of concert going, preparing for ghastly atonal shrieking, but fortunately, this new generation has rediscovered the notion of writing music that people want to listen to, and ‘The Winter’s Brightening’ was no exception. Mr Capperauld wrote that he was inspired by the poem of the same name by Niall Campbell, which describes a Christmas scene where the warmth within a building is contrasted with the cold night without, and where the darkness of winter is gradually overcome by the festive cheer within. His music represents that journey from darkness into light as the harmonies of the piece gradually grow and become richer. It was a lovely piece and warmly received by the audience, and Mr Capperauld was there himself to bask in that warm glow!
An attractive harp interlude, Marcel Grandjany’s transposition and embellishment of Bach’s Andante from his second sonata for solo violin, was beautifully played by Eleanor Hudson, giving the chorus a break, and the audience a chance to digest what had come before.
The final two pieces of the concert were again modern settings, originally of the same poem, ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, written in 1923 by the American poet, Robert Frost. Rebecca Dale’s setting was initially stymied by the Frost estate refusing permission to use the poem in 2016 when she wrote the work for the vocal ensemble, Voces8, but when copyright lapsed on the verse in 2019, she was able to reinstate the original poem and that was what we heard on Monday. It was an evocative setting of another wintry scene and performed splendidly by the chorus.
US composer Eric Whitaker came across the same problem in 2000, but asked another poet, Charles Silvestri, to supply alternative verses, keeping the last word, ‘Sleep’, from the Frost poem, for its premiere in 2010, and this time he stayed with Silvestri even when the Frost poem became available. Again it was a very approachable piece, and warmly sung by the Chorus, expertly conducted by Gregory Batsleer, who had created the whole programme.
As I said at the beginning, the programme looked quite challenging on paper, but it provided the large audience with an excellent concert, of very varied but uniformly fine music, showing that the SCO Chorus are perhaps the finest choir in Scotland at the moment, beautifully balanced throughout the range and able to produce light and shade as well as soft and loud. You can’t ask more from a choir than that! An evocative version of Silent Night was sung as a bonus encore, and we all trooped out into the cold Edinburgh night, cosy and warm on the inside.
