RIAS Kammerchor Berlin and Justin Doyle Present Winter Tales - The Britten Christmas Album
To mark the 50th anniversary of Benjamin Britten’s death on 4 December, the album combines much-loved Christmas music with rarely heard choral works
With the exception of The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard the entire programme is new to the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue
The album will be released on CD and digitally in stereo and Dolby Atmos on 16 October 2026
“A Ceremony of Carols is well known and loved, but the rest of the repertoire will probably be less familiar. The album is conceived as a kind of ‘Christmas stocking’ of discoveries.”
Justin Doyle
The RIAS Kammerchor Berlin and its Chief Conductor and Artistic Director Justin Doyle turn to Benjamin Britten’s choral music for their new album. Winter Tales – The Britten Christmas Album will be released digitally and on CD on 16 October 2026, the year marking the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. At its heart are A Ceremony of Carols‚ A Boy was Born and Missa brevis in D, complemented by A Hymn of St. Columba and The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard. With the exception of The Ballad, the entire programme is new to the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue. The recording also features the boys of the Staats- und Domchor Berlin, harpist Anna Viechtl, organist Marcel Andreas Ober and pianist Philip Mayers.
The album is conceived as a Christmas release but follows no conventional festive arc. Britten’s familiar Christmas music is set alongside works heard far less often, opening up different facets of his choral writing. For Doyle, this repertoire is closely bound up with his own biography. A former chorister at Westminster Cathedral, he encountered several of these works as a boy. For the new recording, he also worked from scores containing Britten’s handwritten annotations, gaining insights into the composer’s sound world and performance practice.
Britten began A Ceremony of Carols in 1942 while returning to Britain from the United States. Before leaving Halifax, Nova Scotia, he acquired Gerald Bullett’s anthology The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems; during the voyage, he set five of its texts, which became the core of the Ceremony. Medieval poetry and plainchant meet Britten’s distinctive harmonies and melodic lines. Although the work is now often associated with children’s voices, it was originally written for adult women’s voices.
Set alongside the Ceremony is A Boy was Born, a work Britten composed at the age of 19: a 30-minute sequence of a cappella variations for adult and boys' voices. Missa brevis in D was written in 1959 for the choir of Westminster Cathedral and its director George Malcolm. Its rhythmically lively Gloria, twelve-tone Sanctus and unsettlingly fading Dona nobis pacem in the Agnus Dei show Britten’s ability to turn rigorous compositional techniques into immediate dramatic expression.
The other works lead into different historical and spiritual worlds. A Hymn of St. Columba was written in 1962 to mark the 1,400th anniversary of Columba’s voyage from Ireland to Iona, combining a text about the Last Judgment with deep organ rumblings and concentrated choral writing. The Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard was composed during the Second World War for Britten’s friend Richard Wood and fellow musicians at the Oflag VIIB prisoner-of-war camp near Eichstätt. Britten sent the manuscript to the camp one page at a time on microfilm. Set against a wintry backdrop, the story tells of forbidden love, jealousy and murder; Britten’s setting follows it with striking immediacy.
Winter Tales was recorded in Berlin’s Auenkirche in January 2026. Its clear yet resonant acoustic and newly restored organ provided ideal conditions for the precision of Britten’s choral writing. The exclusively digital Dolby Atmos version brings out the church’s acoustic space and the choir’s procession in and out of A Ceremony of Carols to beautiful effect.
The changing forces – from women’s voices and harp, to a full choir with boys' voices, to men’s voices and piano – are central to the album’s dramatic design. They make audible the variety of Britten’s music for the concert stage. For Doyle, they also reflect a fundamental idea in Britten’s music: “It doesn’t really matter who sings his music. What matters is that it is performed well, with the appropriate spiritual or dramatic intention.”
Winter Tales – The Britten Christmas Album will be released on CD and digitally in stereo and Dolby Atmos on 16 October 2026. There Is No Rose from A Ceremony of Carols will be available to stream and download from 2 October 2026. Around the 50th anniversary of Britten’s death, the RIAS Kammerchor Berlin will also bring music from the album to the concert stage: on 5 December 2026 at Berlin Cathedral and on 6 December 2026 at the Marktkirche in Hanover, both under Justin Doyle’s direction.
