Christmas Music! (Part 2)

And now, some of my favorite music in the Christmas carol genre. Again, I would love to hear favorites from others as well. I fear this genre is so broad that I can only cover a fraction of it, but I will do so anyway.

Of all the music in this genre, I think my heart is closest to the a cappella choral recordings of the Robert Shaw Chorale. There are some classic recordings from the ’50s (here is an original LP) that were re-released on CD several years ago, but I cannot locate them online anymore. But the Songs of Angels CD contains newer performances of many of these great pieces, and these two CDs also add to the collection. The great thing about these arrangements is that they add musical interest and vitality to the carols with minimal distortion to their character and harmonic feel (e.g., no “strange” harmonic twists). These arrangements mostly represent the collaboration between Shaw and Alice Parker, which has given the world so much beautiful shorter choral music.

Now, if you actually like unusual harmonic twists on familiar carols, then you can branch out to the Dale Warland Singers in Minnesota with these two reissues of memorable recordings. To pick one example of what these CDs contain: Alfred Burt’s carols are hardly masterworks, but they are worthwhile enough to deserve a decent recording, and many of them get that treatment on these CDs.

But I can’t go any farther without mentioning all the wonderful Christmas music from English choirs, much of which comes from the Carols for Choirs books and The Oxford Book of Carols (which also has a newer, more academic, version). There are countless recordings here, but here are a few that are readily available. And, if you don’t find the recordings of John Rutter to be too treacly for a self-respecting musician to take seriously, there are several recordings by him as well. (I do like some of his music, but I wish I could pretend that, for example, “Donkey Carol” never happened.)

I want to mention the Christmas with Chanticleer recording because, beyond featuring their legendary flawless blend and the lovely voice of Dawn Upshaw, it features a rare recording of a multi-movement version of Distler’s arrangement of “Es ist ein’ Ros’ entsprungen” (”Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming”). I suspect it would be viewed by many readers as heresy for me to suggest that Praetorius’ original could actually be improved upon. I won’t, but I will be so bold as to suggest that Distler’s version approaches Praetorius’.

Finally, if you are fed up with traditional carols arrangements (and yet still reading this post) and looking for something more invigorating than sentimental, I recommend recordings the Tallis Scholars and Joel Cohen’s Boston Camerata. You may well find new vitality from ages past.

What musical riches we have, inspired by the humble but cosmically-significant birth in Bethlehem so many years ago!

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Christmas Music! (Part 1)

It’s almost a cliche (and perhaps not “almost”), but Christmas is one of my favorite times of the year. Although the added busyness & stress can sometimes be frustrating, there is so much to like. And, for me, following the rich American tradition of only allowing Christmas music to be played between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, it is a time when a certain not insubstantial section of my family’s personal CD collection comes alive. For you, too, perhaps?

So, just for fun, I thought I’d share some of my favorite Christmas music. I’d love to hear favorites from other readers of this blog as well. For this post, I will focus on fine arts music related to Christmas. I hope to devote a separate post to Christmas carols.

Note: I have at times included links to sample recordings online. Please understand that this is simply a convenient way to show sample recordings and neither an advertisement for a music store nor a true review of any recording.

The first thing that comes to mind for me here is Bach’s Christmas Oratorio (Weihnachtsoratorium, BWV 248). As readers may know, it was not composed as an oratorio, but is rather a collection of six cantatas for performance in the days between Christmas and Epiphany. As the cantatas form a sequence that tell the story of Jesus’ early days, it works reasonably well in collected form.

For me, listening to a John Eliot Gardiner recording of the joyful first movement (I adore every Gardiner recording of Bach I have heard) was love at first hearing. I noticed there is a brand new recording of this piece with Nikolaus Harnoncourt conducting who has also done so many wonderful Bach recordings.

If you consider Handel’s Messiah to be a Christmas piece, you’re probably not paying close enough attention to it. Or, to be more cordial: you might also include it on this list. Certainly, Messiah performances, both amateur and professional, are widespread Christmas traditions for Christians and even many non-Christians. And the rich collection of Scriptural references brings many Christian truths powerfully to mind in a season of heighten spiritual focus.

I also think of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ smaller oratorio called Hodie, based on Lessons & Carols readings and also English poetry (most notably John Milton’s Hymn on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity). I suspect the David Willcocks recording of this work is the classic against which others are judged. The performance is powerful and moving, and I think that Dame Janet Baker’s singing in particular is very memorable. But I see also that there is a new recording with Royal Philharmonic Orchestra playing.

This work has moments for me that pierce the heart with their beauty and send the soul soaring. The Milton poetry inspires Vaughan Williams to touch on both the fragility and intimacy of the baby in the stable in one tender movement (”It was the Winter wilde”) and the cosmic significance of this momentous birth later in the piece. What a great mystery this juxtaposition is! Vaughan Williams ends the work in triumph with the orchestra going full tilt under these words:

Yea Truth, and Justice then
Will down return to men,
Th’enameld Arras of the Rain-bow wearing,
And Mercy set between,
Thron’d in Celestiall sheen,
With radiant feet the tissued clouds down stearing,
And Heav’n as at som festivall,
Will open wide the Gates of her high Palace Hall.

May the music and the message of this season bring home the intimacy and the majesty of this birth to you as well!

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Three Operas

In the past three months I’ve been involved in the productions of three operas, in three cities, in three states. Sometimes it is difficult to argue the relevance of opera to our daily lives, and often more difficult to argue the relevance of particular operas to our Christian lives. What follows, however, are reflections on three particular opera productions, in three particular settings.

Immediately upon my return from Shanghai this summer, I went to El Paso, Texas to work on El Paso Opera’s September production of Verdi’s Aida. (Images of elephants are usually the first association we have with Aida. Unfortunately, Kimba, the elephant which had starred in EPO’s previous production of the opera several years ago, had other bookings and was thus unavailable. Bringing a new “star” in from Los Angeles, by train, would have cost $20,000.) So we contented ourselves with ”noble steeds” for the Triumphal Scene.

It is difficult to escape the influence of religion on the Aida story. So much of the conflict between Amneris and Aida is exacerbated by the high priest, Ramphis’ declarations of “death and destruction” to the infidels. Although the drama ends, as most popular tragedies do, with the violent death of the protagonists, in the second act clemency is offered to the war captives by the Ethiopian king.

From El Paso and Aida I went to Chicago and Chamber Opera Chicago’s production of “A Menotti Tribute” mounted in honor of Gian Carlo Menotti, who died earlier this year. Menotti’s adopted son, Francis Menotti, joined us as stage director as we presented scenes from Maria Golovin, The Last Savage and Goya as well as from Menotti’s more well-known works, such as The Medium, The Consul and Amahl and the Night Visitors.

A tribute such as this is ”all about” organizing the many performers involved in casting the various works (25 singers in this case), putting together production schedules that take into account everyone’s oprofessional obligations, developing scenery which can suggest differing settings with one or two set pieces and helping instrumentalists organize a stack of excerpts and parts. Then it is about developing an emotional “through line” which helps the audience take an emotional journey from the comical self-absorbtion of Miss Todd and Miss Pinkerton (in The Old Maid and the Thief) through the tensions of Baba’s disintegrating personality (in The Medium) into the visceral pain and desperation of Magda, caught in the vagaries of an immigration bureaucracy (in The Consul) to the children’s musical defense against the Martians in Help, Help, the Globolinks.

The evening ended with the final scene from the Saint of Bleecker Street and Anina’s taking of Holy Vows immediately before her death. Rooted as it is in the faith of the Catholic Church, the Saint of Bleecker Street is perhaps Menotti’s finest, most sincere and most powerful work.

From Chicago, I went to Colorado State University to conduct a performance of Benjamin Britten’s Rape of Lucretia. One cannot complain about the opportunity to be in Fort Collins, Colorado for two weeks in “peak color” season.

The power struggle between the Etruscans and the Romans, depicted through the rape of Collatinus’ wife Lucretia is a difficult and oppressive topic. Since the production was performed by full-time students of Colorado State, we rehearsed once a day, in the evenings. We all needed and used the respite of the day to “walk away from” the darkness and anger and violence of the story of one man’s domination of a woman and one society’s domination of another.

Britten was criticized for framing the story of Lucretia’s rape (set many years Before Christ) in a Christian setting (provided by the “commentary” of Male and Female Chorus throughout the opera). Some in the audience experienced this Christian frame as an irritating and irrelevant”add-on” while others experienced it as a merciful, reassuring, edifying “context” for the violence depicted in the opera. The cast and I found, however, that we were dependent on the catharsis provided by Male Chorus’ proclamation of forgiveness and goodness and light at the close of each day’s rehearsls.

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Call Me The Seeker

Because of his surname, I recently noticed a book titled, Call Me The Seeker edited by Michael J. Gilmour. He is no known relation to me. It was, however, the subtitle, “Listening to Religion in Popular Music” that caught my attention. The book is a series of sixteen articles divided into three parts: (1) Religious Sources behind Popular Music; (2) Religious Themes in Popular Music; and (3) Religion and Popular Music’s Audiences. In his introduction, Michael Gilmour writes, “…we share the conviction that spirituality is widely represented in popular music. Songwriters engage religions and their texts and explore grand theological questions, sometimes deliberately, sometimes not.” Well said, Mr. Gilmour. But it strikes me that the word “popular” could be substituted with the word, “classical;” the word, “Songwriters” could be substituted with the word, “composers,” and the sentence would be equally true. Michael Gilmour, in addition to editing this book, wrote one of the essays titled, “The Prophet Jeremiah, Aung San Suu Kyi, and U2’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind: On Listening to Bono’s Jeremiad .” The reference to Aung San Suu Kyi, 1991 Nobel Peace Prize recipient and a leading figure in the current fight for democracy in Myanmar (the former Burma), is particularly poignant today given the recent crackdown in that country. In some circles, the prophet Jeremiah today might be the lesser known of these two! Michael Gilmour argues “…that the relationship of these two clues – the biblical prophet Jeremiah, and this modern-day political “prophet” and social activist – is significant for understanding All That You Can’t Leave Behind.

Music, whether popular or classical, is essentially a spiritual activity and expression. Some songwriters and composers do a better job expressing and communicating their spiritualities than others. Some audiences do a better job hearing and receiving artists’ spiritualities than others. Clearly, Michael J. Gilmour and his colleagues have heard and relate to the spiritual expressions of popular music.

I call them the seekers!

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Names and Words– an end, for a while

It is not easy to characterize people by one criterion. I spoke at the funeral of my friend Bill earlier this year and talking with the kids afterwards provoked the same thought in all of us. Bill had bought one of the first Apple ][+ computers in the late ‘70’s and one would have said he was technologically advanced. However, to my amuse/amaze-ment and his children’s consternation/horror, he stuck with dial-up until his death.

Why do I bring this up here? My last two posts have had opposite views on modern hymnody – gender neutrality in hymns is not an absolute for me – “give me that old-time hymn” expresses my view if the substitution upsets the textual flow. However, I am willing to consider God both as masculine and feminine – far from that “old-time religion”.

Continuing in that line, in general I am not wild about (or to be more correct, I dislike, but not rabidly) the substitution of “you” for “thou” – the latter is archaic but still easily understood and expresses to me a feeling that God is different than the ordinary people we know and consider. As Brian Wren so nicely puts it (see previous post) “Great, living God, never fully known”. This of course is contrary to the German usage, which uses the 2nd person pronoun “du”, which is normally only used for family, little children, animals, and close personal friends.

To me, a formality in worship helps separate worship from everyday life, in a way I suspect like some Catholics feel about the Tridentine Mass. Worship is both part of and separated from everyday life. As Moses was told to remove his sandals because he was on sacred ground, I like to think that going to worship requires some preparation and some focus.

A final thought to toss into this stewpot of ideas. Bishop Muskens has said:

“Allah is a very beautiful word for God. Shouldn’t we all say that from now on we will name God Allah?” he said.

“What does God care what we call him? It is our problem.”

I agree, it is our problem. However because it is a problem to some of us, it will affect our worship experience and our response to God. But, from the hymnody point of view, we could have more mellifluous hymns.

So what am I – conservative, liberal or what? As a friend at our high school reunion commented; he would get together with two other friends from high school and one was very liberal and the other was very conservative. My comment was “does that make you just right?” Of course there is no just right – we all grow and develop in life in different ways. Hopefully my way is best for me (but possibly/probably not for you).

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