Merry Ch(o)ristmas

To celebrate Christmas in music, Opéra national de Lorraine invites you to a festive evening of choral music for the mellow Advent season. The focus will be on the British and Anglo-Saxon Christmas story: choral singing, whether professional or amateur, is more than just a tradition across the Channel and the Atlantic: it is an institution which has given rise to an immense repertoire of incomparable richness, and tempted the greatest composers. The Americans Mark Hayes and Aaron Copland, the British Edward Elgar, Benjamin Britten and John Rutter - founder of the Cambridge Singers - will be surrounded by popular evocations of the Nativity.

At the heart of the concert lies the extraordinary, simple masterpiece from a twenty-eight-year-old Britten. A Ceremony of Carols was composed in 1942 with a truly original scoring for a children's choir accompanied solely by the harp - the immense popularity of the work led to numerous adaptations for mixed choir. This choice of repertoire, texts (many in Middle English) and traditions  took on a special significance for Britten: it was on the ship back to England, after four years of intense personal and musical introspection in the United States, that he began composing it, at the same time as the Hymn to Saint Cecilia: two ways, after an important and essential maturing of his style, of reconnecting with music and a land that he would never leave again.