A Christmas Offering The Choir of Kings College London, Kristina Arakelyan & Joseph Fort

• Kristina Arakelyan (b. 1994): Seascapes:
• 1 Arakelyan: Seascapes: III. Echo 06:39
• O Adonai:
• 2 Arakelyan: O Adonai 04:33
• Sanctus:
• 3 Arakelyan: Sanctus 03:56
• Te lucis ante terminum:
• 4 Arakelyan: Te lucis ante terminum 03:35
• Evening Prayer:
• 5 Arakelyan: Evening Prayer 01:54
• A Christmas Offering:
• 6 Arakelyan: A Christmas Offering: I. Gaudete (plainchant) 02:47
• 7 Arakelyan: A Christmas Offering: II. Gaudete 02:05
• 8 Arakelyan: A Christmas Offering: III. There is no rose 03:03
• 9 Arakelyan: A Christmas Offering: IV. Alleluia! 01:29
• 10 Arakelyan: A Christmas Offering: V. Mary, Flower of Flowers All 04:51
• 11 Arakelyan: A Christmas Offering: VI. Interlude 03:00
• 12 Arakelyan: A Christmas Offering: VII. Te Deum Laudamus 02:10
• 13 Arakelyan: A Christmas Offering: VIII. Out of the East 05:51
• 14 Arakelyan: A Christmas Offering: XI. Jesu, Jesu 02:53
• 15 Arakelyan: A Christmas Offering: X. Now sing we with angelis 02:12
• Ave maris stella:
• 16 Arakelyan: Ave maris stella 02:47
• You Know Me:
• 17 Arakelyan: You Know Me 03:59
• Christmas Lullaby:
• 18 Arakelyan: Christmas Lullaby 04:50
• Dreamland:
• 19 Arakelyan: Dreamland 05:03
• Total Runtime 01:07:37

Info for A Christmas Offering

An album of newly recorded works for Christmas by rising star composer Kristina Arakelyan. This is the first recording by the Choir of King’s College London, conducted by Joseph Fort on Signum Records.

“While preparing this album, I have been struck by many aspects of Kristina’s music, and havevtalked with her about it at length...She approaches the compositional task as an exercise in conveying this emotion and stirring it in her listeners, and I hope that this comes through in our performances” (Joseph Fort)

Proms premieres, cathedral commissions, BBC broadcasts: in some ways, Kristina Arakelyan’s career is as British as it gets. This is hardly surprising: having studied at the Purcell School for Young Musicians, the Royal Academy of Music, Oxford University and King’s College London, Arakelyan is fundamentally a product of the English educational establishment, through and through. A long association with the BBC Singers, beginning when she won the BBC Young Composer Competition at the age of fifteen, a formative fellowship with the National Youth Choir of Great Britain and a commission from St Paul’s Cathedral have seen her writing for some of the country’s leading choirs. And recent compositions—a companion piece for Britten’s Ceremony of Carols and a piece for the newest ‘Carols for Choirs’ anthology among them—attest to the extent to which her music is becoming embedded in the very fabric of the English choral tradition.

Yet this is only one half of the story. Born in Budapest and raised until the age of twelve in Yerevan, Armenia, as a child Arakelyan was immersed in the music of the Armenian Apostolic Church. As a chorister, in the Sunday liturgies she sang the ancient Sharaknots, modal chants thought to have originated in the fifth century and that were subsequently harmonised in the nineteenth century. Moreover, she experienced first-hand a style of worship that places mysticism at its heart, that architecturally uses a large, floor-to-ceiling veil to depict a heavenly sanctuary, and that sees its chief function as drawing the congregation towards the ineffable divine. The music and the traditions of the Armenian Church thus sank deep into her bones. Arakelyan’s Armenian heritage is not just a matter of personal importance, although performing her own piano concerto with the Armenian State Symphony in spring 2025 was of course a moment of great joy for her; rather, it is a key aspect of her compositional voice.

Arakelyan’s choral music, then, might best be understood as fusing elements of the English choral style with aspects of the Armenian Apostolic tradition. This is certainly true of A Christmas Offering, a substantial work for choir and harp from which the album takes its title. The composer readily cites A Ceremony of Carols as a chief inspiration for this piece; indeed, the spirit of Britten surely hung in the air during its 2024 premiere at Snape Maltings with Pembroke College Chapel Choir and Anna Lapwood. Arakelyan sang Britten’s work as a teenager, and recalls being captivated by its vivid imagery and captivating melodic lines. Like Britten, Arakelyan draws her texts from mediaeval carols in Latin and early-modern English, which celebrate the birth of Christ while also looking ahead to his suffering and crucifixion. The music evokes a Western mediaeval soundscape through archaic open-fifth intervals, Lydian modal influences and fast, iambic rhythms—particularly in some of the more upbeat movements, such as ‘Gaudete’. More Eastern influences are never far away, though, and often come to the fore in the softer, slower movements. Exotic pentatonic scales infuse ‘Out of the East’, while an elusive modal mixture of major and minor keys conveys a sense of divine mystery in ‘Jesu, Jesu’.

Esther Beyer, harp
Kristina Arakelyan, piano
Choir of King's College London
Joseph Fort, conductor

The Choir of King’s College London
is one of the leading university choirs in England, and has existed since its founding by William Henry Monk in the middle of the nineteenth century. The choir today consists of some thirty choral scholars reading a variety of subjects. The choir’s principal role at King’s is to provide music for chapel worship, with weekly Eucharist and Evensong offered during term, as well as various other services. Services from the chapel are regularly broadcast on BBC Radio. The choir also frequently sings for worship outside the university, including at Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral. In addition, the choir gives many concert performances. Recent festival appearances in the UK include the Barnes Music Festival, Cowbridge Music Festival, London Handel Festival, Oundle International Festival, Presteigne Festival of the Arts, Ryedale Festival, St Albans International Organ Festival, Spitalfields Festival, and the Christmas and Holy Week Festivals at St John’s Smith Square. The choir enjoys a longstanding relationship with the English Chamber Orchestra, which in 2025 became Ensemble in Residence at King’s. The choir tours widely, with recent destinations including Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Nigeria and the USA.

The choir has made many recordings, in particular for Delphian Records. Recent recordings include portrait discs of music by contemporary composers Kristina Arakelyan, Kerensa Briggs and Edward Nesbit (the latter recognised as Gramophone ‘Editor’s Choice’). Their recordings have also championed the music of twentieth-century British composers such as Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Gustav Holst and Kenneth Leighton. These recordings have received wide critical acclaim; one was described as ‘a performance of astonishing intensity and musicality’ (Marc Rochester, Gramophone). The choir was the partner choir for Choir & Organ magazine’s 2023 New Music Series.

Following some twenty years under the leadership of David Trendell, the choir has been directed since 2015 by Joseph Fort.

Joseph Fort
is College Organist & Director of the Chapel Choir, and Senior Lecturer in Music at King’s College London, where he directs the Choir of King’s College London in chapel services, broadcasts, recordings, concerts and international tours. The Choir’s performances under his direction have been recognised as ‘English choral singing at its best’ (Choir & Organ) and ‘a performance of astonishing intensity and musicality’ (Gramophone). In 2021 he was appointed Director of Music at St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, where he conducts the acclaimed professional choir.

Recent orchestral conducting includes performances with Britten Sinfonia, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Hanover Band and the London Mozart Players. Festival conducting appearances across the world include the Festival de México, the White Nights Festival of St Petersburg, the Montreal Organ Festival, the London Handel Festival, the St Albans International Organ Festival, and the conventions of the American Guild of Organists and the Royal Canadian College of Organists.

Joseph is known for his innovative and creative programming, and his track record of eclectic commissions ranges from new Canticle settings to large-scale works for choir and electric guitar. His expansive discography with Delphian Records has received considerable critical acclaim, including Editor’s Choice and the ‘best new classical albums’ selections in Gramophone. Particular focuses have been around contemporary repertoire and neglected early twentieth-century British music. He broadcasts regularly on BBC Radio 3 and Classic FM.

Joseph holds a PhD from Harvard University, and his academic research focuses on eighteenth-century music and dance. He has published in a number of journals and his monograph Haydn’s Minuets and Eighteenth-Century Dance will be published by Cambridge University Press in September 2025. Prior to Harvard, he studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, where he was the organ scholar, and at the Royal Academy of Music, who in 2017 elected him to their Associateship.

Booklet for A Christmas Offering