I think we're on to a winner with this record: for years, now, parish groups, amateur choral societies professional choirs have all done their nut—aspiring, no doubt, to emulate King's—to produce, year after year carol concerts and newly-devised services of nine lessons and carols, subjecting what were once truly the songs of the people to what Hugh Keyte has aptly termed the ''ritual indignity of 'sophisticated' elaboration''. We've had a surfeit of such fare: indeed, the process itself is running out of steam.
Here, though, is refreshment in the form of a rich repertoire of originals, well-researched, colourful, occasionally rumbustious, often delicately tender; at all events, as far as possible genuine and 'authentic'. The music spans seven centuries, taking us from medieval England to France, Germany, Italy, Spain, even to the New World and Puritan 'shape-notes'. Dates, often actual sources, are listed wherever possible and original combinations of voices, or voices and instruments scrupulously respected, even to the allocation of different lines of one Christmas hymn—Quem pastores laudavere—to four contrasted vocal groupings, as was the practice apparently, in Germany in c. 1600. In reality, there may never have been so polished a performance of O Jesulein suss, nor so gentle a rendering of Swete was the song. We have no proof, either, that the words ''Veni, veni, Emmanuel'' were ever actually sung to the music of the trope Bone Jesu of the funeral responsory Libera me—that is, before Helmore transformed it into an English hymn, but how delightful to hear the high voices approaching from afar singing the French fifteenth-century descant version of our now well-known Advent tune! This year I have no doubt that what I'm going to put in my friends' Christmas stockings will be none other than this fascinating and most enjoyable treasure-trove.'