Behold a tender babe

Paul Mealor's Behold A Tender Babe is a work for Unaccompanied SATB Choir, commissioned by the Hauser-Oberschneider family to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Summer Fields School. The work sets extracts from Robert Southwell's 'In Freezing Winter Night', and lasts around 4 minutes.

A review in the September 2016 issue of Organist's Review states that the 'music responds sensitively and dramatically to the lines of the lyric it chooses to set, rising triumphantly at the words 'with joy approach' before gently falling away as it repeatedly insists 'behold a tender babe'.'

No less difficult, but also no less rewarding, is PaulMealor’s Behold a tender babe, written a year earlier. But it is carefully written so that the difficulties are manageable. The two places where sopranos have a top C are the only points where sopranos divide, so only the first sopranos ascend there. The music follows the details of the words, with drama at ‘do homage to thy King’ and then falling away most beautifully to ‘behold a babe’. - Julian Elloway