Graham Ross (music director): “Few carols express the quiet heart of Christmas more movingly than Christina Rossetti’s 1872 poem ‘In the Bleak Midwinter.’ Her words heighten the intimacy of the nativity scene in a cold, wintry landscape, away from the bright lights and festive sparkle that we encounter in so many other Christmas songs. I remember singing Gustav Holst’s beautiful 1906 setting of these words as a treble chorister in my local church choir and at carol-singing events—my arrangement recasts Holst’s harmonies within a spacious piano part that is both sonorous and delicate in equal measure. “I wrote this arrangement in December 2019 whilst looking out over another beautiful white landscape: above the clouds on a flight back home to London. Looking out of a plane window, you can acknowledge both the beauty and fragility of life, and I think that some of those qualities worked their way into my arrangement of Rossetti’s poem.”