"The year’s most striking Christmas release: an ambitious, multilayered creation from the composer Gabriel Jackson, guiding us through the major Christian liturgical feasts from Advent to Candlemas, with Oxford forces conducted by Benjamin Nicholas. The eclectic music isn’t always comforting but it’s impossible not to be impressed and moved by its pungent force, by the singing of the choir and girl choristers of Merton College, and the Oxford Contemporary Sinfonia’s striking instrumental line-up, dominated by three trombones, strings and saxophone. The recording’s excellent, too"

The Christmas Story is a very individual and strikingly original work. Both the music and the expertly constructed libretto are compelling ... Benjamin Nicholas leads a recorded performance that is assured and completely incisive. The singing of both choirs is marvellous. The clarity of diction and the disciplined singing is exemplary. As for the instrumental playing, it’s expert and accomplished from start to finish; I marvel at the sonorities and illustrative colours that Jackson obtains through imaginative scoring from just eleven musicians, plus the organ ... Gabriel Jackson has composed a work which is an important, eloquent and compelling addition to the Christmas repertoire. This highly accomplished and committed first recording makes the best possible case for it"

John Quinn - MusicWeb International
RECCOMMENDED - read his full review here

"Gabriel Jackson’s The Christmas Story, commissioned by Merton College Oxford, is an extended, disc-length setting of liturgical and poetic texts that span from Advent, through Christmas, to Epiphany and Candlemas. It is epic in conception, and unusual for a piece this size in being entirely choral, without solo voices, although with solo instruments fulfilling a similar function. The accompaniment, by the Oxford Contemporary Sinfonia, has three trombones, giving it often the flavour of Stravinsky’s Mass. There is a prominent part for alto saxophone (Sam Corkin), who dances around the choral lines offering a kind of musical exegesis. Also important in the texture is Chris Brannick’s percussion, not a common timbre in liturgical music, but very welcome here. The music has Gabriel Jackson’s signature weightiness, blocks of chordal material alternating with melismatic melodies. The scale of the music and sweep of the text is cinematic and monumental – and it builds to a powerful and light-suffused final section, “O nata lux de lumine”"

"Here is a version of the Christmas story both familiar and strange. Gabriel Jackson’s cantata largely presents the foretelling, birth and early life of Christ through familiar passages from the Gospels and the Old Testament, and is scored—as one might expect—for choirs, organ and bells, among other forces. Very little of its music, however, will strike the ear as conventional but rather as something both timelessly ancient and contemporary ... "

"There’s often a strangeness to The Christmas Story – of instrumentation, style, text – that helps refocus the ear on a story blurred by over-familiarity. Jackson builds musical bridges out to his more radical gestures, though, helping the listener across to new territory, and strong advocacy from Nicholas and his musicians does the rest. It’s another appealing and viably enduring contribution to the repertoire from an institution putting its commissioning money where its mouth is when it comes to the choral tradition ..."

EDITOR'S CHOICE
read the full review here