On song

The first working day of December and for me the year's first carol concert. There'll be a lot more before Santa clambers down our chimneys.

Few, however, will excel this one in quality and content. Under their conductor Stephen Cleobury, the Choir of King's College, Cambridge, singing in aid of the Anthony Nolan Trust and with the sponsorship of this newspaper, mostly sidestepped the familiar, save for a couple of hymn-carols included for audience participation. Instead, they used the opportunity to showcase some of the carols composed specifically for the choir in recent years, and to present as the core of the concert a performance of Benjamin Britten's A Boy Was Born, composed in 1933 at the age of just 19.

A Boy Was Born - essentially a set of variations - shows a composer already self-confident, with an ability to colour text with originality and assurance. Yet its embracing of the middle-class Anglican stereotype is quite at odds with the slightly maturer composer. Britten, however, never wrote a more idiomatic nor a more technically demanding choral work. The boys and men of King's, together with sopranos borrowed for this piece from the Choir of Gonville and Caius College Choir, gave a gritty if not always supremely polished reading.

Of the King's five recent commissions, the most thoughtful and original settings were Judith Weir's Illuminare Jerusalem of 1985, complete with quirkily brief organ contributions, Jonathan Dove's directly expressive The Three Kings (2000), and John Woolrich's stark Spring in Winter (2001). Philip Ledger's A Spotless Rose, receiving its world premiere, and Bob Chilcott's The Shepherd's Carol (2000), seemed, in contrast, the work merely of professionals. Not so the slightly older but now classic I Sing of a Maiden, by Lennox Berkeley, and Elizabeth Poston's perennially lovely, outrageously simple Jesus Christ the Apple Tree, both beautifully sung.