A Christmas Prelude

Program Notes

The Spectrum Singers
A Christmas Prelude Saturday, November 18, 2023

Some thoughts about my last “A Christmas Prelude” concert with The Spectrum Singers

The very first concert of The Spectrum Singers was performed in Weston, Massachusetts at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, courtesy of their then organist/church musician Curtis Pierce. I had been rehearsing the former members of the James Johnson Chorale, and that ensemble, now newly named, had been searching for a venue for its premiere. The date was December 14, 1980.

Recognizing that choral concerts at December holiday time were very popular, The Spectrum Singers scheduled several more Christmas-themed concerts in the ensuing years, but soon learned that the days and evenings immediately preceding Christmas were veritable logjams of holiday-themed choral concerts, all of which drew upon the same finite number of Christmas choral music concert attendees.

Beginning in November 2002, the chorus established its ongoing holiday tradition—that of “A Christmas Prelude”—sung on the Saturday evening immediately prior to Thanksgiving week, thus launching the holiday season before the oncoming rush of holiday-themed concerts by the many other local musical organizations. And that tradition has been in place, with only one or two exceptions, since then.

Looking into that first concert’s program book, I note that tonight’s concert includes two pieces that were performed that long-ago December—Erhard Bodenschatz: Joseph, lieber Joseph mein, and Herbert Howells: A Spotless Rose. There were also works of Bach, Sweelinck, Schütz, Billings, and Victoria. What that may say about my programming I leave to you. But, I will admit to having some favorites, and those are what comprise this evening’s offerings.

But...how to organize a program of relatively short works of disparate style? What finally seemed to make sense was to follow a timeline of composition, from the Renaissance and pre-Baroque right up to the present day—“A Chronological Choral Christmas” as a friend has put it. I do admit to bending the rules of that timeline a bit in order to help form a reasonable dramatic arc of music from beginning to end.

We open with Andreas Hammerschmidt’s unalloyed shout of joy Alleluja, freuet euch, ihr Christen alle. Scored for a chorus of SSATB with an added small TTB ensemble, dubbed “Favoriti” by the composer, the music abounds with irrepressible good cheer and enthusiasm as it bids all to rejoice in the arrival of Christ, the world’s “Sun of Mercy” (Gendadensonne).

Erhard Bodenschatz first published Joseph, lieber Joseph mein in his 1608 publication Harmoniae Angelicae Cantionum Ecclesiasticarum. Its gentle, rocking triplum-meter opening, contrasted with the center section’s more emphatic duplum wherein Mary attempts to calm her baby’s discomfort, charm us as much now as was likely the case when this music was first heard.

The great Spanish Renaissance master Tomás Luis de Victoria remains pillar of that country’s sacred music, and his superb Ave Maria shows why. Sopranos begin by intoning a fragment of the Gregorian Ave Maria chant, and thereafter unfolds an extraordinarily beautiful framing of the familiar text. Note the musical expansion of “...in mulieribus...” describing Mary’s blessedness among all womanhood, and, most tellingly, the glowingly reverential closing Amen, the crowning glory of this brief but moving masterwork.

Following our short excursion to Iberia, we return to Germany for two superb compositions, G.F. Handel’s And the Glory of the Lord (from Messiah), and J.S. Bach’s jubilant finale to his motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, and thence to neighboring Austria for Anton Bruckner’s rich and reverent 7-part a cappella setting of the Ave Maria text.

Though composer, admired church musician, and virtuoso organist Healy Willan and Anton Bruckner briefly overlap in their years of life, only this admittedly brief contemporaneousness justifies our leap from the Continent to Canada for Willan’s superb Christmas motet Hodie, Christus natus est. While there are many choral settings of this familiar text, few say so much, so skillfully, so joyfully, and in so short a span.

Willan was “Anglo-Canadian,” having been born in London in 1880, and having emigrated to Canada in 1913. He thus spent the great majority of his life in Toronto where, as Precentor of the Anglo-Catholic Church of St. Mary Magdalene, he wrote and performed many of his 800-some compositions.

We begin the second part of our concert having arrived in Great Britain. There we find Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst—close and mutually admiring friends. Vaughan William’s deceptively simple and abundantly charming setting of the Sussex Carol “On Christmas Night” forms a concise crescendo and diminuendo celebration of the season, and Gustav Holst glances back to earlier times with his medieval/Renaissance-sounding setting of Lullay my Liking, its text drawn from “A Mediaeval Anthology” edited by Mary Segar. The music’s five-verse structure is built upon a recurring choral ritornello that spellbindingly weaves the disparate verses together.

Both Holst and Vaughan Williams knew and admired Herbert Howells, a composer of a large and superb body of choral music for the Anglican Church. His long tenure at the Royal College of Music from 1920 until 1979 is even now fondly remembered. His gentle and embracing carol-anthem A Spotless Rose stems from 1919, and it too sets an ancient text from the fourteenth century. The baritone solo at the music’s heart is especially poignant and reverent.

The rose as a symbol of the Virgin Mary has its origin in medieval and Renaissance times, and has long been an inspiration for painters and musicians. Benjamin Britten was moved to invoke Mary in several of his earlier choral compositions, and tonight’s offering is from his well-beloved A Ceremony of Carols, music written in 1942 as he and companion Peter Pears were ship-board on a somewhat perilous war-time journey, returning to Britain from a visit to the United States. The Ceremony was originally scored for 3-part treble (boys) voices with harp accompaniment. In 1943 the work was recast for four-part chorus divisi by the British composer and conductor Julius Harrison. It is this richer and less ascetic-sounding version that we sing for you tonight, with piano acting as our “in hoc citherae.” The anonymous verse is drawn from The English Galaxy of Shorter Poems, edited by Gerald Bullett. The somewhat surprising language you hear is Middle English.

John Joubert, born in South Africa, was educated there in the tradition of the British Anglican Church. He came to the Royal Academy of Music in London in 1946, and thereafter, beginning in 1951, his fame was established by the appearance of his carol Torches, which since then has been considered a classic of its type. Concerning Torches, Joubert has recalled, “I’ve even had carol-singers come to the door and singing it, without knowing the composer lives inside.”

Morten Lauridsen’s web site states the following:

Morten Johannes Lauridsen (born February 27, 1943) is an American composer. A National Medal of Arts recipient (2007), he was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale (1994–2001) and has been a professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music for more than 40 years.

A native of the Pacific Northwest, Lauridsen worked as a Forest Service firefighter and lookout... and attended Whitman College before traveling south to study composition at the University of Southern California with Ingolf Dahl, Halsey Stevens, Robert Linn, and Harold Owen. He began teaching at USC in 1967 and has been on their faculty ever since.

In 2006, Lauridsen was named an ‘American Choral Master’ by the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2007 he received the National Medal of Arts from the President in a White House ceremony, “for his composition of radiant choral works combining musical beauty, power and spiritual depth that have thrilled audiences worldwide.”

So popular have Lauridsen’s compositions become that his publisher states that over one million of his scores have been sold. His initial worldwide fame came as a result of his 1994 composition O Magnum Mysterium. Of this work, Byron Adams has written:

The composer has disclosed that this motet is an “...affirmation of God’s grace to the meek...a quiet song of profound inner joy.” With a text from Christmas Matins...Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium expresses mystical awe of the mystery of the Incarnation as well as the very human tenderness of the Virgin Mary for her Newborn child.

Highly regarded Minnesota composer Stephen Paulus died unexpectedly in 2014. This was a serious loss of a major talent far too early. The Angels and the Shepherds was commissioned by the Dale Warland Singers and first published in 1981. Based on a traditional Bohemian melody with lyrics adapted from poetry by Helen A. Dickenson, it is colorfully scored for chorus, seven handbells, and flute. Typical of this composer, it is concise, energetic, elegant, and memorable.

The music of Welshman William Mathias ranges far and wide, though he is best known here for his singularly adept writing for chorus. Sir Christèmas, published in 1970, might well be described as follows: Revelers march along the street in what might be a slightly inebriated state, and boisterously welcome fellow reveler “Sir Christèmas” to their ranks. Remembering why they are reveling, they then sing “...a maid hath borne a child full young...” But the secular side of their rejoicing ultimately wins out and they sing, in French: “drink you well, my companions.” And, lustily singing, the celebrants continue their boozy stroll until their shouted-out final good wish to their listeners: “NOWELL!”

Ottorino Respighi’s reputation as a first-class composer has often been held suspect by certain self-styled high- minded observers due, in no small part, to the composer’s two most popular and often-heard works, The Fountains of Rome (1914–1916) and The Pines of Rome (1923–1924). These admittedly “Technicolor” tone poems are extremely well crafted, gorgeously orchestrated, and deftly planned for full dramatic and atmospheric impact. These attributes are often admired and applauded in other composers, yet in the case of Respighi, they are occasionally cited pejoratively, as if his music were somehow not worthy of serious consideration. Why might this be?

Blame it, to a certain degree, on Hollywood. Much of the film music from the cinema’s “golden age” of the 30s and 40s is rife with over-the-top romantic excess—skillfully crafted, it’s true—to mirror and enhance equally melodramatic performances played out in front of the camera. There is nothing innately “wrong” with this music. Hollywood has indeed given us some first-class musical talent. But what then had evolved into over-familiar and clichéd film music had, perhaps retroactively and unfairly, affected the “reception” of Respighi, who, truthfully, first created many of these so-called “cinematic” musical effects BEFORE many of these traits were adopted by Hollywood. What irony, then, if this thesis is accurate. Respighi’s music is heard as clichéd because certain ears hear it as “too Hollywood.” Yet it was Respighi’s music which served as a model for Hollywood—not the other way around! Whether or not the foregoing is plausible, early on Respighi attracted no less a champion of his scores than Arturo Toscanini, who regularly programmed the composer’s music, recorded it brilliantly, and performed it with a passionate zeal equal to the attention to detail he lavished on Cherubini, Boito, Verdi, and Puccini.

So here, perhaps, is the true root of Respighi’s inspiration: Italian opera, with all its attendant color, characterizations, atmosphere, and abundant drama. Lauda per la Natività del Signore exhibits all of these “operatic” traits, and yet Respighi achieves this with modest musical forces. The instrumentation is as unusual as it is ingenious: flutes, English horn, oboe and bassoons contribute plangent pastoral color, piano four-hands lends sonorous weight for the finale, and triangle during that finale adds joyful brilliance. Soprano, tenor and alto solo voices sing The Angel, A Shepherd, and The Virgin Mary, respectively, the three roles perfectly matched to their vocal fachs. The chorus, acting as “narrator” and shepherds, completes the cast. Reflecting Respighi’s fascination and respect for early musical forms, the music comfortably oscillates between 20th-century and Renaissance style with, as The New Grove notes, allusions to 16th-century madrigals and Monteverdian arioso. The result is as charming, touching, and quietly joyful a depiction of the Nativity as one might imagine, enriched with a particularly personal degree of intimacy that remains in memory long after the final measures of this delicate music spin into silence.

With this concert, The Spectrum Singers and I wish you the very happiest of holiday seasons!

~ Program Notes © 2023 by John W. Ehrlich