“A Ceremony of Carols” in a new transcription

Project leaders: Diego Franciosi e Giovanni Cestino

A Ceremony of Carols op. 28 is one of the best-known and most frequently performed works by Benjamin Britten (1913–1976). Composed in 1942 during a sea crossing from the United States to the United Kingdom, it sets to music—for three treble voices and harp—a selection of nine carols or Christmas-themed poems drawn from The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems (ed. Gerald Bullett, 1923). The collection was later arranged into a cycle, framed by the Gregorian antiphon Hodie Christus natus est and interspersed with an interlude for solo harp.

To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death, ITER Research Ensemble has created a transcription of the work for treble voices and two guitars (respectively with 6 and 10 strings). The transcription forms part of a broader project to expand the repertoire for choir and guitar, which ITER shares with guitarist Nicolò Spera, and which has already resulted in a CD.

The transcription, prepared by Giovanni Cestino and Diego Franciosi—himself a guitarist as well as a member of ITER—aims to adapt the harp part to a plucked-string duo, despite the markedly different resources involved as for timbre and registers. The result is not simply a division of the harp part between two instruments, but a new instrumentation. On the one hand, it exploits the idiomatic possibilities of the guitar; on the other, it enables a renewed understanding of the composition’s dense polyphonic writing. Distributing a part originally conceived for a single performer between two players produces a kind of “tomographic analysis” of the original. Through this process, the harp part reveals itself as implicitly multi-instrumental, as though it condensed several instruments into one—an effect that the transcription, in our version, assigns by turns to one or the other guitar. The resulting, unprecedented fusion with the voices enhances the work’s expressive potential and presents A Ceremony of Carols in a new guise.

ITER Research Ensemble, together with Nicolò Spera and Diego Franciosi, will present this transcription to the public in a series of Christmas concerts scheduled for 2026.