Mediæval Bæbes:
Of Kings and Angels—A Christmas Carol Collection. QOS (Queen of Sheba).
$12.98.
Suzie LeBlanc: La Veillée
de Noël. ATMA Classique. $16.99.
Christmas in Harvard Square.
The Boys of St. Paul’s Choir School conducted by John Robinson. Decca. $18.99.
Season’s Greetings—The Allentown
Band. Allentown Band conducted by Ronald Demkee. Allentown Band. $14.99.
John Tavener: Ypakoë;
…Depart in Peace; Trisagion; Two Hadiths of the Prophet Mohammed. Linn
Records. $19.99.
Missa Conceptio tua: Medieval and
Renaissance Music for Advent. Schola Antiqua of Chicago conducted by
Michael Alan Anderson. Naxos. $9.99.
Madrigals of Madness. Calmus
Ensemble. Carus. $18.99.
Every year, the approach of
Christmas provides singers and listeners alike with chances to revisit familiar
seasonal musical territory and, at times, explore some less-known works that
tie into winter and its holidays. Many recordings are released for this
purpose, and these days almost all of them are high-quality in both performance
and sound, their only inherent flaw being a determined seasonal focus that
makes it unlikely they will be listened to very often (if at all) at other
times of the year. Two entirely typical examples are the new Mediæval Bæbes collection of Christmas carols on the QOS label and soprano
Suzie LeBlanc’s almost entirely French-language release for ATMA Classique. The
Mediæval Bæbes CD is distinguished not only by
fine singing but also by accompaniments that render even familiar carols such
as We Three Kings, Good King Wenceslaus,
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen and Silent
Night unusual and exotic in sound. The arrangements, done mainly by the
group’s founder, Katharine Blake, include folk instruments such as saw and
hurdy-gurdy along with decidedly old-fashioned recorders, lyres and violas da
gamba. Most of the 17 accompaniments are simple and straightforward, allowing
the vocals to be the center of attention throughout. The medieval elements are
especially appropriate for such carols as Gaudete,
Veni Veni Emmanuel, In Dulci Jubilo and the Corpus Christi Carol, but they are attractive in the more-modern,
English-language works as well. Listeners will find the words and tunes
familiar but the ambiance unusual here – a pleasing combination of well-worn
and less-known elements. On the LeBlanc disc, English speakers will find fewer
items that they recognize – even the two pieces sung in English, Up and down the southern shore and Sir Symon the King, are scarcely
household tunes. The rest of the 16 tracks are in French, and while some of the
works will be known to English speakers (such as Les Trois Mages as We Three
Kings), most will not be. That means this CD provides an enjoyable
opportunity to hear well-sung versions of Christmas music quite different from
the everyday: La Veillée
(“The Vigil”), O Dieu l’étrange
chose (“Oh God, the strange thing”), Plus
on est de fous, plus on rit (“The More the Merrier,” sung in two separate
versions), and many others. The individual items are not especially
distinguished and will not likely supplant more-familiar Christmas music for
English speakers, but they supplement better-known carols very well and offer,
through this sincere and attractively performed CD, some interesting
cross-cultural opportunities that nations such as Canada take for granted in a
way that the United States does not.
English speakers, whether in
Canada, the United States or elsewhere, will take more immediately to the
almost-angelic purity of the voices of the Boys of St. Paul’s Choir School,
whose Christmas in Harvard Square
presents 19 works that pass from sacred to secular, Latin to English, familiar
to unfamiliar, without apparent difficulty and without any apparent increase or
diminution of enthusiasm. John Robinson leads O Come All Ye Faithful, Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, and Ding Dong Merrily on High with beauty
and fervor, and the 25 boys just as enthusiastically sing Omnes de Saba venient, Mater ora filium, Puer natus est, and Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree. A work
from the Matins of Christmas fits as well here as a traditional Irish melody
and a piece using the words of Christina Rossetti. Indeed, the weakness of this
Decca CD is that all the music gets the same treatment, with little regard for
the styles or approaches of the different periods in which it was written; but
some listeners will consider this a strength rather than a weakness, since the
singing is uniformly lovely throughout and all the music comes across with
suitable beauty, dedication and that ineffable Christmas spirit. Christmas in Harvard Square is something
of a “souvenir” disc – it feels like the sort of takeaway one purchases after attending
a particularly enjoyable live performance – and while it will have little
staying power beyond from the Christmas season, it is a CD that will surely
receive multiple uses during the
season from anyone who enjoys these fine, clear young voices and their well-modulated
approach to all the pieces on display here.
Listeners who prefer
instrumental recognition and celebration of Christmas – and Hanukkah as well –
will enjoy the 17th volume in a series called “Our Band Heritage,”
featuring the Allentown Band and released on the ensemble’s own label. Ronald Demkee
leads the band in 13 works both spirited and spiritual: Leroy Anderson’s A Christmas Festival and Sleigh Ride, Percy Faith’s Brazilian Sleigh Bells, an arrangement
of Victor Herbert’s March of the Toys
from Babes in Toyland and one of the
traditional Carol of the Birds, plus
Moravian, Celtic, French and Russian Christmas music – the last sampling of
these being quite extended and featuring fine organ playing by George Boyer. The
Hanukkah offering, called Eighth Candle,
is performed with as much sensitivity and care as the Christmas works, and the
disc as a whole – which was recorded in 2002 – has plenty of verve and spirit
to mark the season, providing a well-chosen combination of tunes that will be
familiar to almost everyone and ones that few will know. The Allentown Band,
which first performed in 1828 and is the oldest civilian concert band in the
United States, performs both the transcriptions and the original works for band
with smoothly honed skill and a fine sense of rhythm and flair – even when the
music itself is not of very considerable consequence.
For something significant
and truly unusual within the overall Christmas ethos, listeners can turn to a
new Linn Records CD of music by Sir John Tavener (1944-2013). None of the four
works here relates directly to the Christmas season, but all possess a sense of
ethereality and reaching-out in a spiritual context that fit the season very
well – even when they draw on non-Christian religious traditions, as does Two Hadiths of the Prophet Mohammed.
This motet, for two sopranos, two altos and Renaissance bray harp (an
instrument with a drone-bass sound quite different from what a modern harp
produces), is performed by Canty, the group that co-commissioned it and gave
the first performance in 2008. The Hadiths, which are sayings attributed to
Mohammed, reach across religious fault lines in a spirit that seems apt for
Christmastime: I was a hidden treasure, And I longed to be known, So I
created the world; and God is a
beautiful being, And He loves beauty. The emotional communication of the
piece is direct and clear. So is that of …Depart in Peace, which Tavener
dedicated to the memory of his father and which has a meditative, ethereal
quality entirely appropriate for a fond remembrance. It combines the Nunc
dimittis (“Now you dismiss,” from the gospel of Luke) with Alliuatic
antiphons, focusing the soprano, violin, tampura (a long-necked Indian drone
instrument) and cellos on beauty through hypnotic segment repetition, ending in
a chant that sounds Middle Eastern. The Scottish Ensemble’s lovely performance
of this work, whose focus is Simeon’s words after he takes the infant Jesus in
his arms, makes this a beautiful seasonal piece as well as a lovely memorial. The
disc also contains two instrumental works, of which Ypakoë, for piano (very
well played here by Elena Riu), focuses through its five movements on the
Passion and Resurrection of Christ – more an Easter story than a Christmas one,
although of course the two are as intimately related as
fallow-winter-and-spring-rebirth tales have been for thousands of years. The
final work on the CD is Trisagion, a
quintet for brass whose title is a Greek word that means “thrice holy” – and is
the name of an important hymn in Orthodox churches. Although not directly
religious, the piece was created against a religious background (Tavener
converted to the Russian Orthodox faith in 1977), and its slow-moving, mostly
consonant chordal structure is in the spirit of a typical hymn. The Wallace
Collection plays this technically difficult music with considerable sensitivity
and smoothness. Although Tavener’s music is not to all tastes, not even to the
tastes of everyone interested in liturgical and religious compositions, the
four pieces here – a fair representation of his work – will have resonance in
the Christmas season and beyond.
The Schola Antiqua of
Chicago performance of Missa Conceptio
tua by Pierre de la Rue (c. 1452-1518) has a direct tie-in to the holiday
season, not to Christmas itself but to Advent, for which this half-hour Mass
was written. The Naxos recording is a world première, and Michael Alan Anderson’s sensitive direction of the
half-hour work produces a warm and deeply felt version of the traditional Latin
Mass – not the most distinguished of the many settings of the words, but one
that is emotionally true and heartfelt. The disc’s Advent focus also extends to
seven Latin O Antiphons (that is, O Adonai, O Clavis David, O Rex Gentium
and others) and the plainchant Alma
Redemptoris Mater (“Nourishing Mother of the Redeemer”); and the disc
concludes with three beautifully sung late Medieval English carols: There is no rose of swych vertu; Hail Mary,
full of grace; and Nova, nova!
This is a CD whose music first anticipates and then, in the concluding carols,
celebrates the birth of the Christ child – a very apt seasonal presentation
with essentially a single focus on love and redemption.
The focus is considerably
wider in the equally well-performed Carus CD called Madrigals of Madness, which features the works of seven composers
of the 16th and 17th centuries. What the Calmus Ensemble
explores here is not the madness of the composers themselves – although the
four harmonically unusual madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613), who is as
well known for being a murderer as for being a composer, may make listeners
wonder. The disc actually looks into forms of madness as reflected in music:
the madness of love and lovesickness, war and loneliness. In addition to the
madrigals of Gesualdo, the works here are What
is our life? by Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625); La bomba by Mateo Fletcher (c. 1481-1553); Lamento d’Arianna by Claudio Monteverdi (1567-1643); Scaramella by Josquin Desprez (c.
1450/55-1521); La guerre by Clément Janequin (c. 1485-1558); and Too much I once lamented by Thomas
Tomkins (1572-1656). The madrigal form changed little during the period covered
here, but some of the harmonic inventiveness became greater, and not just in
Gesualdo’s examples. The expressiveness of the music is substantial, its
concerns far more secular than sacred in pensive meditations on sadness, death,
war and love. But these works are not mere lamentations: they are expressions,
often stylized ones, of deeply felt emotions held in check only by the beauty
of the music itself. Unlike discs intended wholly, or at least primarily, for
the Christmas season, this is one that speaks to all times of the year and to
people of any faith, delving into emotional territory to which any listener
captured by the sound of the madrigal will respond – even hundreds of years
after these works were created.
No comments:
Post a Comment