Christmas came early to Gloucester last week where, on a sultry August day before an audience in summer shirts and sandals, the cathedral gave the premiere of a new Christmas Oratorio – packaged for good measure with Britten’s Ceremony of Carols as part of a concert that will broadcast in December to listeners who’ll have no idea of the unseasonality in what they’re hearing. Such are the deceits of radio.
To write a Christmas Oratorio is a bold move: what you do will be compared with Bach. And to produce a piece that uses much-loved hymns with new and not so lovely tunes, as this one did, was a mistake on the composer’s part – the composer being Bob Chilcott, who writes in the breezy, easy-listening manner of John Rutter without the moments of genius that rescue Rutter from banality.
