Southwell Music Festival’s Christmas Celebration. Southwell Minster, 08 December 2025, 5✩✩✩✩✩, Review: William Ruff.
Photo credit: Tom Platinum Morley.
Southwell Music Festival’s Christmas Celebration. Southwell Minster, 08 December 2025,
5✩✩✩✩✩, Review: William Ruff.
“The Southwell Festival presents a Christmas Celebration of exceptional artistic integrity.”
The Southwell Music Festival offers its annual Christmas Celebration in a very crowded market-place. In fact, it’s in market-places (as well as in public buildings of every sort) that you hear Christmas music at this time of year. So what’s special about Southwell? For a start, a group of 13 hand-picked singers, for the most part members of the UK’s top chamber choirs and veterans of glorious Southwell summer festivals. And then there’s the Minster, the perfect stage on which to mount this yearly mix of music and poetry, the atmosphere created by the architecture and acoustics an equal partner with the sounds you hear.
The Southwell Christmas Celebration has become renowned not only for creating a stimulating mix of old and new, but also of presenting traditional carols in exciting new arrangements which allow audiences to reach again inside their meanings and to feel them afresh.
This Celebration included three new pieces written by a composer with strong Southwell roots, George W. Parris, former chorister at the Minster. His ‘Advent Responsary’ (sung from behind the audience) was an evocative blend of sounds both ancient and modern as well as exploring strikingly dramatic ways of mixing solo voices with the full ensemble. His insight into the potential of the human voice was also heard in ‘…Of a mayden’, a piece which introduced a wide range of vocal techniques in ways which the virtuoso singers of the Festival Voices clearly relished. The third piece, ‘Little Tree’, came as a much more lyrical contrast, full of wonder, joy and tender lyricism.
Other highlights included the opening ‘O Viridissima Virga by Hildegard of Bingen, an extraordinary chant of soaring melodic lines which evokes the lushness and vitality of nature as a metaphor for spiritual renewal. Bob Chilcott’s ‘A Shepherd’s Carol’ captured the wonder of the nativity through the eyes of humble shepherds, its flowing, lyrical style creating an atmosphere of quiet reverence. There was also a very fine, close-harmony arrangement of ‘Good King Wenceslas’ (for four male voices) and a hilarious, virtuosic version of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, incorporating some convincing, hilarious animal noises.
The ‘Carol of the Bells’ has become a seasonal favourite in recent years. Its composer is the Ukrainian Mykola Leontovych and it has become famous for its highly distinctive motif imitating the ringing of bells. The Festival Voices combined razor-sharp precision with supercharged, driving rhythms. Other pieces which bridged the gap between ancient and modern were: Alfred Schnittke’s ‘Bogoroditse Dyevo’ (a work whose intensity partly derives from its dynamic contrasts and emotional power); Richard Rodney Bennett’s ‘Susanni’ (full of rhythmic vitality and colourful harmonies) and Sally Beamish’s ‘In the Stillness’ (whose soft melodic lines create a mood of calm and introspection.
There was also virtuosity of another kind, that of the actor Clive Mantle who performed a similarly wide range of poetry, both funny and serious, old and new. He slipped effortlessly from one accent to another - Cockney, Cotswolds, American - as he brought to life works by Dickens, Laurie Lee, Longfellow and many others, in readings which invited contemplation of the Christmas season in all its variety, both secular and sacred.
Festival Founder and Director Marcus Farnsworth was the conductor, as always ensuring vocal precision, deep emotional commitment to both music and texts whilst using his long and intimate knowledge of the Minster’s acoustics to maximum effect. Although Christmas music is currently everywhere, you won’t find anywhere greater artistic integrity than at Southwell.
Southwell Festival Voices directed by Marcus Farnsworth
Clive Mantle (reader)