Benjamin Britten’s beautiful carol sequence A Ceremony of Carols is the centrepiece of Nonsuch Singers’ Christmas concert at Holy Trinity Sloane Square. The most popular of Britten’s Christmas pieces, it was originally composed for harp and boy trebles or women’s voices. Britten wrote it in 1942, while he was making the perilous journey back across the Atlantic from America aboard a Swedish freighter. We will be performing it in the arrangement for mixed choir by Julius Harrison. Also on the programme is Britten’s Hymn to the Virgin, an exquisite double-choir setting of a medieval carol that he made in 1930 when he was just 16. Poulenc’s joyful, reverent Christmas Motets of 1952, sometimes playful, sometimes solemn, along with the Jesu Carols by the American composer Stephen Paulus, the Advent motet O Adonai by Roderick Williams, The Oxen by the American composer Marjorie Hess, and A Spotless Rose, a perennial favourite, by Herbert Howells feature in the concert, which also includes music by Bairstow, Bruckner, Joliffe and Rathbone.