Tom Wright
Advent is more complicated than Easter. When Paul Spicer approached me about writing a follow-up to our ‘Easter Oratorio’, suggesting we take Advent as the theme, it seemed to me both completely appropriate and freshly challenging. Easter is about one single, massive moment: the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. We have four different accounts of that moment and its immediate aftermath, and for the Oratorio we took John’s version as having the most obvious and varied ‘human interest’, in the meetings of the risen Jesus with several of his followers. Advent isn’t like that. It’s about two different historical moments which, though they’re umbilically joined, do not immediately reveal how they fit together. The great, massive Advent moment is still to come in the future, and this provides the over-arching structure of the present Oratorio…
Read more: Advent Oratorio (PDF 113 KB)