Christopher Morley chooses some less obvious Christmas compositions often overlooked in favour of the 'blockbusters'.

Every Christmas the big seasonal blockbusters come round, headed by Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (though Bach actually originally composed that as six separate cantatas for the Nativity period).

We shouldn’t neglect, though, less well-known works which celebrate the Christmas season, beginning with Bach’s Magnificat.

This concise, high-powered composition, festive with trumpets and drums as well as crooningly expressive woodwinds, is a setting inspired by the reaction of the Virgin Mary after the Annunciation that she was carrying the Son of God, and we know the piece well in its final form, framed in the key of a blazing D major.

But its original version, composed for Bach’s first Christmas at St Thomas’ Church in Leipzig in 1723, and rarely performed nowadays, is cast in a key a semitone higher, the sumptuous E-flat, and contains four Christmas Interpolations – two German hymns, two Latin ones – which the final version has discarded.

I first encountered the Bach Magnificat (and was bowled over by it) when I sang in my first concert as an undergraduate in the choir of the Birmingham University Musical Society in the splendid Great Hall at the end of the Christmas term in 1966. The supreme baroque expert, Professor Anthony Lewis, was the conductor, and, using his French connections (he had studied under the formidable Nadia Boulanger), he also introduced us to Une Cantate de Noel by Arthur Honegger.

This Swiss composer was perhaps the most “serious” composer among the iconoclastic French group known as “Les Six” (though Francis Poulenc comes pretty close in my book), and his music is powerful stuff: King David, Joan of Arc at the Stake, and at least two of his five symphonies which sear with the horrors of the Second World War (strange, perhaps, from a Swiss).

His Christmas Cantata was completed in 1952 on his sickbed after suffering a severe stroke (at that stage he was only 60 years old); it was to be his deathbed three years later. The plan had been for Honegger to compose a grandiose work lasting several hours, the morning devoted to an Old Testament prelude, the afternoon and evening devoted to New Testament resolution. In the event we have a 25-minute masterpiece which grips in its conciseness and emotional outreach.