We’ll be singing this piece at our 6pm Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols Service. It is a setting of the Christmas responsorium ‘O magnum mysterium’ for choir and solo cello by Ola Gjeilo, who named it ‘Serenity’. Kim Worley will be playing the cello for us. The work featured in the 2015 ‘Carols from Kings’, sung by the Choir of Kings College Cambridge.
Ola Gjeilo (b. 1978) is Norwegian by birth, but moved to the US in 2001 to take up studies in piano and composition at the Juilliard School in New York, where he now lives as a freelance composer and pianist. He has also studied at the Royal College of Music in London.
Gjeilo has written many choral works, both a capella and accompanied, and has been recorded by groups such as Voces8 and Tenebrae. Gjeilo has become known for improvising on the piano over his own choral compositions.
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