After all the cooking and the shopping, the wrapping, packing, decorating and the laden-car journey cross-country, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Christmas ends on Christmas Day. After so much build-up it’s a moment of release and fulfilment – the collapse onto the sofa after weeks of frenetic activity. But liturgically of course it’s just the beginning, the first chapter in an ongoing story.

This sense of Christmastide as an unfolding narrative is embedded in Bach’s Christmas Oratorio. Most often heard today as a single evening of music, this extraordinary work was conceived as six individual cantatas – each performed on a different day between Christmas and Epiphany – taking us from the birth of Christ to the adoration of the Magi.

In a normal year such a sequence of performances wouldn’t be possible, but in our newly digital, pre-recorded Covid world one group is seizing the opportunity to give us a chance to hear the Christmas Oratorio as Bach himself would have heard it – almost.