A Spectrum Singers Christmas Celebration
Saturday, December 12, 1998 at 8:00 pm.
William Mathias
Wassail Carol, A Babe is Born
Zoltán Kodály
Veni, veni Emmanuel
William Walton
What Cheer?
Benjamin Britten
A Boy was Born, Three excerpts
Theme: A Boy was Born
Variation III: Jesu, as Thou are our Saviour
Variation V: In the Bleak Mid-Winter
Gustav Holst
This have I done for my true love, In the Bleak Mid-Winter
Healey Willan
Hodie, Christus natus est
Elizabeth Poston
Jesus Christ, the Apple Tree
Marc-Antoine Charpentier
Messe de Minuit pour Noël (ca 1690) with a consort of period instruments
Texts and translations
Program Notes
The Spectrum Singers bring a rich variety to their December holiday concert each season. This year is no exception and offers a reprise of an audience favorite first programmed six seasons ago, the charming Midnight Mass of Marc-Antoine Charpentier, plus a healthy portion of music from Great Britain, with brief forays to Canada and Hungary.
William Mathias opens and closes our first half with his unique blend of traditional texts set to zesty contemporary melodies and accompaniments. Zoltán Kodály's 1943 arrangement of one of Christmastide's most beloved melodies, Veni, veni Emmanuel, canonically explores unexpected and poignantly touching regions of expression and harmony, and offers an especially rich and memorable final cadence. William Walton's What Cheer? is over in a moment, but offers a mini-feast of his typically tangy harmony and jazz-flavored rhythm.
A more serious sphere is encountered in Benjamin Britten's early a cappella masterwork, A Boy was Born. A large-scale work of theme and variations for unaccompanied divided chorus, boys' choir and soloists, A Boy was Born presents significant challenges of execution to all but the most accomplished of choirs. Perhaps because of this, the composer revised the work in 1958 and added an independent organ part, likely hoping this change would afford the work more performances. The Spectrum Singers will offer three a cappella excerpts from the original version of this major Britten opus: Theme, Variation III, and Variation V. The Theme is set as a beautifully harmonized chorale. Each of the two highly contrasted variations frame a haunting, high soprano solo. Variation III speaks in homophonic choral phrases, answered intermittently by a high-arching solo intonation of the name Jesu. Variation V is an extraordinary impressionistic image of a crystalline, feathery snowfall scored for women's voices alone, whose vocal lines drop weightlessly down the staff much like the lightest of snows on a particularly still and frigid night. Floating through and above this misty scrim of sound is a lone soprano whose words tell the metaphorical medieval tale of the wounded knight and the maiden who cares for him in his torment. These few moments of surpassing and haunting beauty give ample evidence of the early flowering of an immensely gifted composer, and of a major work, rightly deserving to be heard.
Healey Willan calls upon more traditional background material for his inspiration and often achieves a transcendent beauty in his many choral works for the church. This Hodie, Christus natus est has echoes of Sweelinck and Palestrina settings of the same text, but bears a standard of harmonic modality, rhythm, and ultimate richness of cadence all its own.
Two sides of Gustav Holst are offered -- his public persona as heard in the popular hymn setting of In the Bleak Mid-Winter, and his more private and personal side as presented by the rhapsodic part-song This have I done for my true love. The latter, rarely performed these days due perhaps to its somewhat controversial characterization of Christ's tormentors, is another relatively unknown gem. Its text, too, is of the mystic, symbolic sort and tells Christ's story -- couched in a first-person narrative "flashback" form -- from his birth at Christmas through his ultimate triumphant resurrection. By foreshadowing the death of Christ at the very beginning, Holst's story follows an ancient precedent much like the Tristan-like metaphor employed in Britten's A Boy was Born and also heard in Tchaikovsky's poignant and very Russian carol setting of The Cherry Tree. Though Holst's music for the church is beloved by choirs everywhere, his work remains mostly unknown in the general music community, save for The Planets, whose deserved popularity paradoxically seems to have inhibited further exploration of this composer's music in this country.
Elizabeth Poston's wonderful setting of what probably was a Shaker text is notable for its unadorned simplicity and quiet, inward-turned ecstasy. The anonymous verse's image of Christ as an apple tree -- an image rife with all manner of Christian symbolism, from Christ as nurturer to the memory of the forbidden fruit of Eden -- was perhaps inspired by the "Spirit Drawings" of fruit-laden trees and verse one can view today in Shaker villages as close as Harvard and Hancock, Massachusetts. These drawings were made while the maker of them was in a trancelike state of holy spiritual visitation, much as spiritualists such as Edgar Cayce are said to be "channelers." The work moves from a soprano beginning through the addition of altos whose presence creates a spare harmony. Men's voices join and enrichen for two verses, after which the sopranos are again alone, happily, one believes, to contemplate in solitude the simple gifts bestowed on the world by the grace of Jesus Christ -- The Apple Tree, indeed.
The holiday season affords an ideal time to appreciate the unique repertoire of French music, with its extraordinary diversity of expression, the broad palette of timbre and color, the graceful, sometimes sensual melodic curve, and a softness nurtured by the language and culture. This special essence -- a combination of tonal, cultural, and harmonic syntax -- gives us what we today recognize as a uniquely French tonal palette.
The Messe de Minuit pour Noël, or Midnight Mass, written in the early 1690s, is the ninth of twelve settings of the Ordinary by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, who was born in Paris sometime between 1645 and 1650 and died there February 24, 1704. Highly regarded during his lifetime, he was less well known than Lully, though Charpentier's music is today thought to be the equal of his more famous contemporary.
Charpentier studied in Italy where he spent perhaps three years (between 1662 and 1667) studying with his most famous teacher, Carissimi. He returned to France and began a long association with Moliere's troupe until 1686. He was appointed Maitre de Musique at St. Paul-St. Louis, the principal Jesuit church in Paris, and in 1698 ascended to the Sainte-Chapelle, a position of high prestige, second only to the royal chapel at Versailles.
The Midnight Mass takes much of its melodic invention from old French noëls -- popular carols of the day which rose from secular roots. Carols being almost "the pop songs of the church" as Paul Driver has characterized them, it must have been highly amusing to Charpentier's congregation that the composer had used such non-sacred material as canti firmi for so sacred a text, though precedent for this was set long before. But Charpentier has treated these "tunes" with a diligence and a care for detail and expression which ennobles their humble origins.
H. Wiley Hitchcock, one of today's authorities on the composer and whose edition of the Messe de Minuit is the basis of our performing edition, has written "...he seized every opportunity afforded by the texts of his sacred works to dramatize, characterize, and personalize them." These three gifts of expression are especially evident in the "Et Incarnatus" section of the Credo, where the chorus's hushed pianissimo forms a halo for the flutes' gently down-drifting line depicting the descent of the Holy Spirit. The entire Credo, in fact, declaiming the very beliefs central to the Roman Catholic faith is given the richest variety of color and mood and acts as the musical and dramatic high point of the entire composition. It's left to the gentle and touching Agnus Dei, taken as an elegant and courtly dance, to quietly lead this lovely and heartfelt work to its close.
Notes Copyright (c) 1998 by John W. Ehrlich
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