Howard Goodall's Christmas Cantata brings together seven of the composer's most renowned festive choral works to form a new, inspiring narrative. It seeks to address the powerful universal messages of the nativity story with the theme of mother and child in search of refuge at the heart of each movement. The words and music celebrate the joy of hope in overcoming hardship, fragile circumstances and grief, a message ever more present in the world today. Through Goodall's engaging and accessible style, this cantata provides a stunning celebration of Christmas choral music that you will return to year after year. The full score is for soprano solo, SATB choir, organ and chamber orchestra, here the vocal score includes a piano reduction for rehearsal. The entire work lasts approximately 45 mins.

From the introductory: Spiritualism, and Its General Teachings. Man, a thinking, reasoning, and morally responsible being, is the crowning glory of God. He is furthermore a trinity in structure, made up of the soul, of a spiritual and of an earthly body. The soul, the conscious innermost of man, is a potentialized portion of the deific life, incarnated in the material body for a more potent individualization, and for necessary experiences in the realm of matter. Death, just as natural in a ripe old age as birth, is the severing of the co-partnership existing between the spiritual and the earthly body. Man is naturally a religious being, and the seals of his manhood are consciousness and intuition, reason and aspiration. And further, man desires to live again; desires to meet his friends in the higher life; desires to know and love them, and with them progress through eternity.