|
|
|
ID: CHRCD013
CDs: 1
Type: CD
|
Collection:
Choral Collection
Subcollection: Christmas MusicDame Felicity Lott and the Joyful Company of Singers serve up rich Christmas fayre with 'Plum Pudding', well-spiced with favourite carols and readings by actor Gabriel Woolf.
PLUM PUDDING
‘A rich boiled suet pudding with raisins, currants, spices, etc.' (OED).
You'll find no ‘boiled suet' in our offering, but rich and well-spiced fare abounds - and unlike its namesake our pudding is bursting with plums! First, though, a warming drink as we Wassail with the merry folk of medieval Yorkshire: ‘…all over the town… in the wassail bowl we'll drink unto thee'. Vaughan Williams, renewing his quest for traditional airs after the horrors of war service, made his exultant arrangement in 1919. Almost a century earlier, in his beloved Northamptonshire village, John Clare was immortalising country life through the seasons; in December, when ‘GladChristmas comes…' he vividly evokes the simple pleasures of that ‘day of happy sound and mirth'. Close contemporaries, Victoria (1548-1611) and Byrd (c. 1543-1623) both began their musical life as choristers, at Avila Cathedral in Spain and at London's Chapel Royal respectively. The former's magnificent motet O magnum mysterium, its arching phrases intertwining like a great cathedral's vaulting, was written in Rome in 1572. Byrd's equally intricate but more worldly This Day Christ Was Born - subtitled ‘A Carroll for Christmas Day' - appeared in his last published songbook in 1611. Moving back to medieval times, to the Wakefield Mystery Plays, we hear God - portrayed by a worthy merchant in his guild's ‘pageant' - reflecting on his treatment of Adam, and summoning Gabriel to tell Mary that she will bear his Son.
Only the ‘Pageant of Shearmen and Tailors' survives from Coventry's contemporary play-cycle, and it is this which furnishes the text of the “Coventry Carol”, Lully, lullay - sung here in Kenneth Leighton's glorious 1956 setting for ethereally serene soprano and choir. By way of contrast Rhian Samuel (b. 1944 and, like Leighton, a distinguished teacher as well as composer) brings Jolly Wat the Shepherd to vivid life in her strikingly harmonised ballad.
After such exuberance, it is time for calmer contemplation. The 15th-century poem I sing of a Maiden, with its gentle portrayal of the sleeping Maid, and haunting refrain ‘He cam also style … as dewe in Aprylle …' is perfectly complemented by the lovely Mariä Wiegenlied; in Peter Broadbent's arrangement of Reger's 1912 ‘slumber-song' a pair of sopranos duet ecstatically above a soft choral accompaniment. Felicity Lott returns to tell the story of The Three Kings ‘from Persian Lands afar'; Elgar's organist friend Ivor Atkins (1869-1953) wrote the familiar arrangement of this Weihnachtslied (Christmas song) originally written in 1856 by Liszt's pupil Peter Cornelius. A darker view of The Journey of the Magi informs T.S. Elliot's 1927 poem, in which one of those kings, years afterwards, recalls the bitter cold and hardship of their journey and, for all its ‘satisfactory' end, reflects equivocally on the changes wrought by that Birth.
There is bleakness, too, rather than the rustic revelry which Laurie “Cider with Rosie” Lee's name might lead one to expect, in his 1954 poem Twelfth Night, adroitly set to music by the American composer Samuel Barber in 1968. This austere meditation on the earth's ‘utter death', more animated at ‘his birth our Saviour', returns at the close to a restatement - albeit more hushed - of its opening line: ‘No night could be darker than this night'. Lee's memories of Christmas in Seville, on the other hand - he had a lifelong love affair with Spain - bring welcome respite. The children who sang him carols, ‘their faces set in a kind of soft unconscious rapture', moved him deeply - understandably so, if they even approached the purity of tone and radiant sense of innocence which the Joyful Company of Singers conjure up in Guerrero's heart-easing Virgen Sancta, written in 1589. How those same children might have revelled in Andrew Carter's arrangement of the Spanish Esta Noche (‘This Night'), with its guitar effects and infectious high spirits.
How many poets have made such music from words alone as Dylan Thomas? He wrote (and read) his original Memories of Christmas for BBC Radio in 1945. Two years later, for the magazine Picture Post, he added a postscript to it, the Conversation About Christmas; Gabriel Woolf's reading captures all the sly wit embodied in its dazzling wordplay. One of the best-loved English carols, The Holly and the Ivy, introduces the topic of traditional Christmas Decorations, a theme taken up by the journalist, novelist and Punch contributor E.V. Lucas (1868-1938). A sequence of letters between a rector and his parishioners - aptly interspersed between lines from the rousing old Welsh song Deck the Hall - reveals how the best-laid plans can go increasingly awry. No festive celebration of this kind would be complete without The Twelve Days of Christmas - and we are treated to two variations on the theme: John Julius Norwich's hilarious warning against taking the old song's message too literally is aptly counterpointed by Andrew Carter's roistering choral arrangement. Another swift change of mood ensues. In Christmas Truce Captain R.J. Armes, writing home from the muddy hell of the First World War's trenches, touchingly describes an utterly unexpected experience. Then, across the desolate no man's land, steal the strains of the Stille Nacht. On Christmas Eve in 1818, in the Austrian village of Oberndorf, disaster struck when the church organ broke down. The organist, Franz Xaver Gruber, gratefully accepted some verses written two years earlier by the parish priest, Josef Mohr, and hastily set them to music; the choir sang the piece that night, to the accompaniment of a guitar - and the rest, as they say, is history. In another remembrance of Christmases past, Leonard Clark tells how he had almost forgotten the Singing in the Streets, before Gruber's immortal melody returns, this time in English. Joyful indeed are Felicity Lott and the Company of Singers as Silent Night, in Peter Broadbent's richly-harmonised arrangement, brings our festive feast to a contented close. |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: GMCD7226
CDs: 1
Type: CD
|
Subcollection: Choral and OrganChristopher Eastwood plays the organ for In The Bleak Midwinter, and conducts The Three Kings.
Mark Williams (A Spotless Rose)
Rebecca Willcox (In The Bleak Midwinter)
William Tallon (In The Bleak Midwinter)
Sylvia Garnsey (Coventry Carol, Once In Royal)
Thomas Lydon (Three Kings)
Poulenc: Quatre Motets Pour Le Temps De Noel
Poulenc’s religious music, while expressing perfectly his profound Catholic faith, was always closely bound up with his relationships with friends and lovers. He had been catapulted back to the church in 1936 by the death in appalling circumstances of the composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud. His great opera Dialogues des Carmelites was deeply affected by the illness and death of his lover Lucien Roubert. These four exquisite miniatures seem to have been written, between November 1951 and May 1952, at least in part as gifts for their dedicatees: indeed they are such private pieces that no proper record exists of their first performance. What may have been their premiere was given, rather incongruously, in Madrid by the Netherlands Chamber Choir. Poulenc dedicated the first of them, a dark, tender setting of "O Magnum Mysterium", to the conductor of that performance, Felix de Nobel. The gentle second motet "Quem Vidistis Pastores" was a tribute to one of Poulenc’s closest woman friends, Simone Girard. She was the secretary of the Avignon Concerts Society and by all accounts an indefatigable organiser and fine amateur pianist. To Poulenc she was indispensable. In a letter of 1951, in which he offers her the "Quem Vidistis", he tells her "You have the ultimate intelligence - quite simply that of the heart, a sentiment surely appropriate to this evocation of the simple shepherds seeing the star over Bethlehem. The set is completed by a setting, marked "Calme et doux", of "Videntes Stellam", and an exultant "Hodie Christus Natus Est" which seems to be made up entirely of fanfares. |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: DVD-7013-9
CDs: 1
Type: DVD
|
Collection:
Jazz
Format: Colour, Dolby, DVD-Video, NTSC
Language: English
Region: Region 2 (This DVD may not be viewable outside Europe. Read more about DVD formats.)
Aspect Ratio: 4:3 - 1.33:1
Number of discs: 1
Classification: Exempt
Studio: Pinnacle Vision
DVD Release Date: 17 Nov 2003
Run Time: 60 minutes |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: DSPRCS601
CDs: 1
Type: CD
|
Subcollection: ChoirCoro’s new album 'This Christmas Night' is now available to order online but will not be comercially available through stores until Christmas 2008. All pre-orders will be shipped from Thursday 27th November.
This CD will also be on sale at Coro’s Christmas concert, St.Luke’s Church, Sydney Street, London on Saturday 13th December. |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: BC3006
CDs: 1
Type: CD
|
Collection:
Christmas Music
Subcollection: Christmas MusicLive from The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
J. S. Bach: Chorale Prelude BWV645 'Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme' / Chorale Prelude BWV603 'Puer natus in Bethlehem' / In dulci jubilo
Clarke, Jeremiah: The King's March / Prince Eugene's March
Cornelius: The Three Kings
Crees: Christmas Trilogy
G. Gabrieli: O Jesu me dulcissime
Holst: In the Bleak Mid-winter (Cranham)
trad.: God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen / Ding dong! merrily on high / The Twelve Days Of Christmas
Warlock: Balulalow / Bethlehem Down / Tyrley Tyrlow /
Maltworms
Matthew Rose (bass) / Royal Opera House Brass Soloists & Members of the Royal Opera Chorus, Eric Crees |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: GD287
CDs: 1
Type: CD
|
Collection:
Choral Collection
Subcollection: ChoirBooklet and songs in Bulgarian language only
Soloists: Bozhidar Todorov, Vanina Ivanova, Nadia Pavlova, Maria Radoeva Bulgarian National Radio Children’s Choir Hristo Nedyalkov, conductor Accompaniment: Bulgarian National Radio Light Music Orchestra Willy Kazassian, conductor
Hristo Nedyalkov - the founder, artistic director and chief conductor of the Bulgarian National Radio Children’s Choir, is also composer of a great number of songs, which generations of Bulgarian children grew up with. Especially popular among them are his winter and Christmas songs. They are sung by children at kindergartens and schools, numerous children’s choirs also perform them. The present programme includes a part of these greatly loved songs, performed by the Bulgarian National Radio Children’s Choir. The release also contains the instrumental accompaniments to the songs. |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
|
ID: ALBCD013
CDs: 1
Type: CD
|
Collection:
Folk Music
Subcollection: Christmas MusicArranged by Ralph Vaughan Williams
Eight Traditional English Carols
Six English Folk Songs
TwelveTraditional Carols from Herefordshire
Vaughan Williams had begun collecting folk-songs and carols in 1903. Many Folk-songs and Carols were collected in the early 1900s by Vaughan Williams and Ella Mary Leather who visited local gypsies in Herefordshire where together they rescued traditional songs that may well have disappeared forever.
These songs and carols remind us of our childhood and the power and beauty of songs sung by those generations long before our own.
Australian baritone Derek Welton is a very much sought-after concert artist who has performed at the Barbican, Cadogan Hall, Royal Albert Hall, The Sage Gateshead, Bridgewater Hall, Symphony Hall, Birmingham and the Wigmore. Iain Burnside once again accompanies for Albion Records, who enjoys a unique reputation as pianist and broadcaster.
Derek Welton, baritone
Iain Burnside, piano |
| 15.00 eur Buy |
|
|
