"If you find the whole Christmas-carol- with-mince-pie-and glass-of-sherry thing just too smothered in brandy butter for your taste and are searching for a truly new, sincere musical interpretation of the season, then Gabriel Jackson: The Christmas Storyis for you ... The Choir and Girl Choristers of Merton College, Oxford, and Oxford Contemporary Sinfonia, directed by Benjamin Nicholas, bring this scholarly work to life. It's not singalong stuff, indeed it's quite chewy at times, but it is excitingly modern and deeply sincere. And it's rooted in the college. The new Dean of Lincoln, the Very Rev Dr Simon Jones, was chaplain at Merton and compiled the libretto, using the King James Version of the Bible, part of which was translated at Merton, and he includes specially commissioned poems by two contemporary Merton poets, Penny Boxall and Mary Anne Clark. Don't peel the sprouts to this one, but sit down and absorb its many moments of beauty"

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 ... "