This year’s Christmas concert marks Hesperos’ seventh anniversary, with a programme shaped around the seven great O Antiphons of Advent. These ancient chants, sung here in their plainchant form and in luminous modern settings, call for light and wisdom in the darkest days of winter.

This constellation culminates in Jonathan Dove’s radiant Seek Him that Maketh the Seven Stars, one of the most beloved contemporary choral anthems, which imagines first the glimmering of Pleiades and Orion, and then a whole heaven of starlight -  ‘yea, the darkness shineth as the day, the night is light about me’. This theme finds a new voice in a specially commissioned work by Will Todd, Starlight, written for Hesperos, alongside Oliver Tarney’s The Wise Men and the Star.

A crystalline quality shimmers through the evening’s music, especially in the meditative minimalism of Arvo Pärt, whose 90th birthday we also celebrate this year. We will also perform ‘…which was the son of …’, in which the text moves backwards through time from the nativity to the creation of the world. His music, alongside works by Herbert Howells, Toby Young, CaroIine Shaw,and Vytautas Miškinis, holds together a programme which is at once mystical and celebratory.

Programme

Bogoroditse Devo - Arvo Pärt

The Children's Eye - Caroline Shaw

O Adonai - Toby Young

O radix Jesse

There is a flower - John Rutter

O clavis David

Here is the little door - Herbert Howells

O oriens

O rex gentium - Matthew Martin

O Emmanuel

…which was the son of… - Arvo Pärt

Interval

Dum medium silentium - Miskinis

Starlight - Will Todd

I sing of a maiden -Amy Bebbington

In dulci jubilo- Robert Pearsall

The Wise Men and the Star - Oliver Tarney

Io, io - Jocelyn Morlock

Seek Him That Maketh the Seven Stars - Jonathan Dove

Carols