Like the Dutch Old Masters before it, Gerald Finzi’s work transposes the Nativity on to a ‘dark frosty Christmas Eve in our own familiar landscape’.

Perhaps it’s something to do with immigrant parents – childhood Christmases often spent back “home” in climates where frosty nights would be as unthinkable as mulled wine or holly-covered country churches – but the books, music and poems that speak loudest to me at this time of year have one thing in common: they’re all English.

It’s a tendency shared by composer Gerald Finzi, whose In Terra Pax, like the Dutch Old Masters before it, transposes the Nativity on to a “dark frosty Christmas Eve in our own familiar landscape”. And it’s this combination of the intimately, prosaically familiar and the mystical, spiritual and strange that gives this tiny cantata – barely 20 minutes of music – its power.

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