Trinity College Advent Carols Service this Sunday, Nov. 25

Trinity College Advent Carols Service this Sunday, Nov. 25

Reposted from Choir of Trinity College's Facebook page (@TrinCollChoir):

This Sunday the choir will sing it’s final service of 2018, the annual Advent Carol Service (this year marking the week preceding Advent Sunday). Attended by 700 hundred people, this is our biggest service of the year, and always a memorable night for the choir, college, and all of our guests and friends from around the world.

As is tradition, music by Bach, David Willcocks and Paul Manz will suffuse the service, alongside a much-loved setting of the Advent Responsory by Richard Marlow, Organist and Master of the Choristers of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1968 to 2006. Our service will also feature music by highly celebrated composers Jaakko Mäntyjärvi and Ēriks Ešenvalds, with both of whom the choir enjoys close friendships, as well as Jonathan Dove’s beguiling ‘Seek him that maketh the seven stars’ and Morten Lauridsen’s world-famous ‘O magnum mysterium’.

But we have a unique connection to the oldest piece in our service, the late Medieval carol ‘Ther is no rose of swych vertu’ in an arrangement by John Stevens (1921-2002). The carol music and text (in middle English and Latin) survive in a 15th-Century manuscript now held in our own Trinity College Library, Cambridge (MS O.3.58). The vellum carol roll, known as The Trinity Carol Roll, is of East Anglian origin and was gifted to the College in 1838 by one H. O. Roe, Esq. ‘Ther is no rose of swych vertu’ is the last carol of thirteen in the collection and probably the best known to carollers today. On Sunday evening it will be sung in an Advent service in Trinity College for the tenth consecutive year, and in what is approximately the six-hundredth anniversary of the carol's composition. We hope you’re able to join us for the occasion!

For more information about the Trinity Carol Roll, visit this entry in the Library’s online ‘Treasures from the Collection’ series:
https://trinitycollegelibrarycambridge.wordpress.com/…/tri…/
And, for a beautiful digitisation of the manuscript, visit:
http://trin-sites-pub.trin.cam.ac.uk/james/viewpage.php…
Tune-in to http://trinitycollegechoir.com/webcasts/live/ at 6pm on Sunday evening to hear our service sung live.