Carols Revisited – Christmas with the BBC Singers

In 2024 the BBC Singers will celebrate its centenary year, and since its founding almost 100 years ago, the choir has held a unique place at the heart of the UK’s choral scene through continued collaborations across the years with many of the world’s leading composers, conductors and soloists.

After finishing a busy 2023 BBC Proms season, which saw the group perform at both the First and Last Nights, as well as concerts with Sir Simon Rattle and Jon Hopkins, they began the recording sessions at Maida Vale Studios which became Carols Revisited – five much-loved Christmas carols and an extraordinary version of the iconic Band Aid single ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, in beautiful new choral settings.

In the case of the carols, the Singers set out to re-ground the songs in the innate spirituality of choral plainsong - from whose roots they had originally developed - whilst simultaneously, via new arrangements, bringing them forward into a modern sound-world. To that end each piece features delicate solo piano accompaniment, and the overall feeling is of listening to music at once both powerfully old and sparklingly new.

Amidst these changes, the songs themselves never lose any sense of identity but retain their deep familiarity – particularly in the case of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’, which, when lifted from its usual context and reimagined for (almost) solo voices, takes on a truly goose-bump inducing beauty, without ever losing its own ineffable strength of character.