On Christmas Night CD

This new recording of Christmas music released 20th October 2014

Peter Medhurst | bass-baritone

Jeremy Limb |piano

with

Maciek O’Shea | baritone

(An Earthly Tree a Heavenly Fruit – William Byrd,  O Little town of Bethlehem – Peter Medhurst)

Philip Salmon | tenor

(Maria, Mater – Fauré)

THE MUSIC

The selection of music on this recording is inevitably a personal one and is taken from a repertoire that I have enjoyed performing with my colleagues since my earliest salad days. The styles and periods range from settings I made of The Coventry Carol and The Sans Day Carol to Sergei Liapounow’s extraordinarily atmospheric piano piece, Nuit de Noël. Well-known Christmas songs by Adolphe Adam and Max Reger contrast with lesser-known works such as Arthur Baynon’s bold and brassy The Spanish Main and Marie Joy Sanger’s exquisite Christmas Cradle Song, of the 1940s. As arranger, I particularly enjoyed linking Archbishop Wadding’s late 17th century verses For St Stephen’s Day (which lack a dedicated melody) to a period French hymn tune that seemed to me to have spent four centuries in search of a set of thought provoking words.

Peter Medhurst

London, September 2014