Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 It's here! I hope that all of your Christmases are merry and bright, even in a year as grating and dark as this has been.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 On the Eve, here are a few favorite entire albums of mine!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 The Polar Express is rather a polarizing movie, mostly because of the style of animation Robert Zemeckis used in making it. The landscapes and a whole lot of the film's compositions are frankly gorgeous, and the story is (for me, anyway) fun, fleshing out what is a classic picture book in which not a whole lot happens. (This is not a criticism of the book, by the way! It's a picture book that's about 30 pages long, and the main attraction there is the amazing art.)

What turns people off Polar Express seems to be one big factor, but it's not one you can really escape if it does bother you: the characters' eyes, which in this style of digital-capture animation tend to look...glassy, lifeless, dead. The eyes look unblinking and like what you'd see in a doll. This never impedes my enjoyment of the movie, but I can't argue with people who react strongly against the movie on that basis, either.

And all of that has nothing to do with the music, which is wonderful and amazing. This is one of the best scores Alan Silvestri has written, and for me it's absolutely a Christmas classic. Silvestri blends engaging action music with quotes of traditional material and his own gorgeously sweeping melody that's all about the magic of this time of year.

It's almost here! Can you still hear the ringing of that bell?

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 Here's an album I grew up with...or maybe it wasn't quite this album, but it was certainly this guy singing. I most definitely remember this version of "We Three Kings", but I don't know if this is actually the original record or if this selection is a repackaging. Anyway, it's the Christmas stylings of American tenor Mario Lanza.

This music is really a throwback to a style of operatic singing that isn't much in vogue anymore. Born Alfredo Arnold Cocozza, and taking the name "Mario Lanza" as a stage name later on, Lanza started out as a classical tenor before his big voice and good looks carried him straight to Hollywood, where stardom beckoned. After World War II he ended up with MGM, where he made several films before various difficulties led to him being dismissed from MGM, spending a year as a recluse, returning to film but with less success, and finally to planning a return to the opera stage in 1959. By this time Lanza had a number of health problems owing to his weight and probably alcoholism, and he died in 1959 of an aneurysm.

His personal life seems to have been a mess, and his family didn't really life happily ever after, either. His wife died of a drug overdose just months after he did; his son died of a heart attack when he was just 37 (younger than Lanza himself had been at his death), his daughter was killed when she was hit by a car while crossing a street, and his other son died in 2008 at just 55 years of age.

Setting aside the sadness of Mario Lanza's life, his voice is something to hear. No, he's not Pavarotti or Domingo, but he had a big and golden-sounding voice, and listening to this record now, I'm struck by his command of phrasing and his superb diction. He's not just a big-voice, big-chested tenor belting out high C's from the sky, and like many things I remember from my youth, I appreciate this sound a lot more now than I did then.

Here's Mario Lanza.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 Do you have any musical items on your lifelong wish list? Something you'd be sad if you reached the end of your days and never got to hear? I do! I'd love to attend a performance of Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, the full ballet, with full-on Russian choreography and a live orchestra (sometimes, in smaller venues, ballet companies perform to recorded music). Here is the Bolshoi in 2011, performing a wonderfully arresting version of the great ballet. This is some amazing stuff!

And if you don't have time for the entire thing (make time!), you can always enjoy the condensed Suite that Tchaikovsky put together. I've written before of what this suite means to me on a personal level, as one of my fondest musical memories.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 I had a music teacher in third and fourth grade, when I was going to an elementary school in Hillsboro, OR, who at one point taught us a song from an opera based on the old fairy tale of "Hansel and Gretel", called, appropriately enough, Hansel und Gretel. The song is a cheery thing near the beginning of the story when Gretel is teaching Hansel a dance. I remember the teacher, Mrs. Sturdevant (I think that was her name), telling us about the opera that had been written a hundred years or so before, by a composer named "Englebert Humperdinck". I hate to admit that this particular name had a predictable effect on a room full of nine-year-old children, and I seem to recall Mrs. Sturdevant being a bit irritated that we giggled.

Sorry, Mrs. Sturdevant.

Anyway, I actually bought a recording of Humperdinck's opera many years ago. It was a pretty nifty CD box that in addition to the 3 CDs and the booklet containing notes and the libretto, also had a little jigsaw puzzle depicting a scene from the opera. There was a period when sometimes CD box sets would come with little things like that, especially if they were recordings of music that might appeal to young listeners. Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel is often considered a children's opera, because it is not terribly long, it's full of folk tunes and dances, and its story is loaded with magic and wonder and an evil witch who wants to back the kids in her oven. Hansel und Gretel has become something of a Christmastime staple, even though it doesn't exactly have anything specifically to do with Christmas. I haven't heard it more than once or twice and those many years ago, so I addressed that this weekend.

Hansel und Gretel is like Wagner-lite: the orchestration and the drama are pure Wagner (Humperdinck himself was a committed Wagnerian), as is a lot of the imagery in the show. But because the story is lighter and free of Wagner's heavier tendencies, the opera is a pretty good bridge between the Wagner-parody of Carl Stalling's work on the Loony Tunes shorts and, well, actual Wagner. As for the opera's Christmas associations, there's the story of two children who get into trouble, and the magic of a life-size gingerbread house; also, the opera was premiered very near Christmas in 1893. When you think about it, a lot of our Christmas trappings don't really have anything to do with Christmas specifically. The Sound of Music song "My Favorite Things" is a good example.

Having freshly heard Hansel und Gretel, I certainly plan to make it a part of my annual listening from now on. The performance I'm featuring here is especially nifty, because it's actually a film made out of the opera, with Sir Georg Solti conducting (and this type of repertoire was Solti's wheelhouse, so it's a treat on that score as well). Live action is combined with animation to create the requisite sense of magic, and the performances are thrilling throughout. This film was intended for television, and aired on PBS's Great Performances in 1981--not long after Mrs. Sturdevant was dealing with a bunch of kids laughing at the name "Engelbert Humperdinck".

If you have a spare hour and forty-five minutes, give this a listen! It really is something of a delight. And look at the screen once in a while, because there's actually usually something neat going on.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 And now we're into the last seven days before Christmas. As tends to be my practice, the selections will get longer as we get close to Christmas, because we could all use more music!

This is an entire album by Chanticleer, a magnificent all-male vocal ensemble based in San Francisco. Originally founded to perform Renaissance music according to historical performance practice, the group has branched out over the years to recording other genres. But their main "bread and butter" remains their Renaissance work, and I always love listening to them. It gives me the feeling of walking through stone cathedrals on cold days and nights, illuminated by either sun streaming through stained glass windows or by candles in sconces casting too little light to keep the vaulted ceiling above me from vanishing into the shadows. It's the music of spice and incense and torchlight, of colorful robes and fine doublets and, yes, a dagger tucked into one's belt or boot.

The final track of this album, by the way, is not a Renaissance piece at all, but a composition by Franz Biebl, a twentieth century German composer who only died in 2001. While Franz Schubert's setting of the Ave Maria is undoubtedly the most famous, for me Biebl's is the more beautiful. I won't claim it's the most beautiful, since there are many settings I haven't even heard, but the one here is truly magical. I've known it ever since the Wartburg College Choir sang it as part of our annual Christmas program, back in the day.

Here is Chanticleer, performing their entire album. A Chanticleer Christmas. The days are truly growing short now, so find what light you may!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 Obviously I've known for years that Elvis Presley recorded a number of Christmas songs over the years, but I did not know that a bunch of his best-known ones spring from a single album called Elvis's Christmas Album, and neither did I know that not only is this album one of the best-selling albums of all time, but it is also Elvis Presley's only diamond-certified album. These are things I learned yesterday from a Facebook post by Sheila O'Malley, who gave me permission to reproduce it here, so here are her words. (If you're going to inquire as to Sheila's Elvis fandom credentials, well, to quote Captain America: "Son, just don't.")

Here's Sheila:

“ 'Santa Claus is coming down your chimney tonight' sounds absolutely filthy when Elvis sings it. It might be his best blues vocal ever, with those beautiful stops that nobody could do but him." -- Tom Petty

When I was writing that Eminem piece this summer I went down the rabbit hole of "diamond" albums. There are less than 100 of them IIRC and it is a fascinating and sometimes bizarre list. Adele and Kenny G. Boyz II Men right next to ZZ Top. The Titanic soundtrack! Multiple Garth Brooks albums. MC Hammer. Hootie and Def Leppard. Em's got 2 diamond albums on there - the Marshall Mathers LP and The Eminem Show. Usher. Carole King hand in hand with Biggie. Wikipedia has the full list - I came across a very funnily written ranked list of all 92 diamond albums (92 at the time - the piece is from 2016 - I'll link it in the comments.

[AN INTERJECTION: Here's the piece Sheila mentions, summing up the diamond albums up to 2016. It's an interesting piece, especially since I had no idea some of these records were THAT huge: "Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness"? Really? I do remember that album being a big deal, and I even think I own a copy, but I had zero notion that it was that big a deal. Granted, the 1990s were not a period when I was terribly up to date on pop music, but you'd think I'd have heard that that album was doing THAT well.

I also find it slightly irritating that the writer disses the film score tracks from the "Lion King" soundtrack album. "Making you sit through four Hans Zimmer instrumentals in between the two sets (of songs or Elton John tracks) is pretty low," he writes, which is exactly the kind of dismissive attitude to any kind of music other than what the reviewer prefers that I always find off-putting. It was, actually, this kind of thing that ultimately led to me canceling my ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY subscription many moons ago, but that's not especially relevant to this discussion. Back to Sheila! -Ed.]

Elvis' 1957 Christmas album is diamond-certified. It wasn't reviewed all that well at the time - but of course it sold millions and has gone on to be the best-selling Xmas album in the US as well as one of the best-selling albums - period - of all time. The album is a MONSTER. It was a monster THEN and it's a monster NOW.

In other words: on a list featuring mostly contemporary people like Britney Spears, a Christmas album from 1957 is still going strong.

The album features traditional carols, Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" (the story about him calling for EP's version to be banned is ... suspect, imo.), and "Here Comes Santa Claus" and of course "Blue Christmas" - the Christmas song always associated with him, with Millie Kirkham's swoopy soprano in the background (his idea! Everyone else was like, "Uhm, are you sure you want her to do that through the whole song? It's a bit much." He loved it. He insisted. He was right. Near the end of her life, Kirkham gave an interview where she joked, “If I was gettin’ royalties, I’d be a rich old woman.”)

The B-side features religious songs like "O Little Town of Bethlehem" and "Silent Night". Elvis incorporated gospel in his repertoire from the jump - a bold move for someone who was going where he was going. In his 3rd and final Ed Sullivan appearance in January 1957, where Ed Sullivan shook his hand and looked right into the camera saying, "This is a fine young man" - (which almost single-handedly calmed down the fervor of controversy around him) - Elvis sang "Peace in the Valley" - meanwhile, his "Baby Let's Play House" - an ode to happily living in sin with your girlfriend - is a #1 hit - at the very same time. And his teenage fans didn't reject the gospel. "Peace in the Valley" was released as a single at first - and it went to #1. They didn't make enough albums to satisfy the demand - fans had to WAIT to get "Peace in the Valley." That was his superpower at the time. When he sang "Peace in the Valley" on the Ed Sullivan show, and he sang it straight, filled with an earnest and simple faith - it created major cognitive dissonance in the "he's an evil sexpot ruining our youth" crowd.

But the opener of the Christmas album, the first song on the album, is one of the raunchiest tracks in his entire raunchy repertoire - and that's saying something! This is the ferocious and dirty "Santa Claus is Back in Town", written by the great duo Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. Even to modern ears the song - or, what Elvis does with it - is so over-the-top dirty it still conceivably could be seen as shocking. (There are some good covers - not too many though, because why would you put yourself in the position of competing with the original. Dwight Yoakam's is good! Totally different feel, but it SWINGS.)

The song starts with the Jordannaires quartet crooning sweetly, "Christmaaaaaas Christmaaaas Christmaasss" - there are little bells chiming behind them. Like it's going to be a sweet little sleigh ride. This is a fake-out. It's a trick. The Jordannaires say: "This is what you can expect from this song." You feel safe. You reach for the hot cocoa and settle into your armchair by the fire.

And then Elvis arrives. You've had no time to prepare for him.

The way he sings "You be a real good little girl" is not just dirty, it's debauched.

"Hang up your pretty stockings .. turn off the light ... Santa Claus is coming ... DOWN YOUR CHIMNEY TONIGHT." (See Tom Petty's comment above. You're almost embarrassed by it, but it's also so funny!)

And listen for his evil cackle during the bridge.

The fact that this is the first track ... that Elvis didn't bury it to appease the haters ... that he included this track basically alongside "Silent Night" ... represents an aspect of him that is still not wholly grasped. He LED with this. I still can't get over it.

Elvis asked you to reconcile the boy who loves Jesus with the boy who cackles like a sexy demon during the bridge of “Santa Claus is Back”. Neither was an act.

Can the culture embrace such inclusion and inclusiveness? Can the culture accept the secular and the divine, simultaneously? We are so much more comfortable when only one thing is true at one time.

Elvis says, "Both are true. And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Deal with it."

And here is the entire album, on a single YouTube video. I love a good long epic listen as much as anybody, but there is also something to be said for Elvis Presley creating this much magic in just a single 30 minute record.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 One of my favorite Christmas carols is "The Wexford Carol", which has that pre-Western harmony thing going on that gives it an air of mysterious beauty. Here it is, performed by Allison Krauss, Yo Yo Ma, and others. Just wonderful!

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 Because we are privileged to live alongside one of the very greatest of all Americans, a person who has generated more light for the world than most power plants...here is Dolly Parton.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 I feature this song every year: Dan Fogelberg's "Same Old Lang Syne", which to me perfectly captures a normal part of the emotional fabric of Christmas: the wistful looking-back as we get ready to add another year to the pile. It's easy to gaze into the past and wonder about the futures that might have been had we made one decision or another along the way, and this song describes a moment in Fogelberg's life--a real moment, as it turns out--where he came face to face with someone with whom he shared a past before their lives diverged.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 I just heard this a few minutes ago on Sirius XM and thought, "Well, there's today's selection!" I had, to my current recollection, never heard this before. It's called "Joys Seven", and our performers are the Ensemble Corund. It is based on an older carol, "The Seven Joys of Mary", which numbers seven specific joys Mary experienced as she beheld the life of her son, Jesus Christ. This subject matter is not specifically Christmas, but Christmas is a lot of things, isn't it?

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 For some years now, The Wife's cars have had Sirius XM radio enabled, in order to make our road trips more pleasurable. One thing I've noticed about the Sirius channels--in addition to there simply being VERY MANY of them, enough to satisfy a whole lot of music tastes--is that since their revenue is already built-in, not only are ads minimal, but the channels aren't limited to small but popular playlists. If you listen to an "oldies" station now, the only Van Morrison you'll ever hear is "Brown Eyed Girl", and this despite the man's very long and prolific recording career. On Sirius you'll hear obscure deep-cuts, songs that were hits back in the day but which have not stood the test of time, and more.

(I know, that all sounds like a paid ad, but I'm getting somewhere with this, I swear! The Sirius folks have not paid me for any of this.)

So yesterday I'm driving about to run a couple of errands, and I'm in The Wife's car, so I'm playing one of the Sirius Christmas channels--the one that's devoted to older songs, so it's the channel where you'll hear Roy Coniff's "White Christmas" and Doris Day's "Silver Bells". A song came on that I don't recall hearing before, or if I did, it's been a long time and it's certainly not a Christmas standard. It was called "Pretty Paper", and after an introduction by a pop-music chorus, the main singer starts in, and I was floored. Did you ever hear a song that you'd never heard by a singer whose voice was unmistakeable? That's what happened yesterday. This fellow has one of the recognizable voices of all time.

Here's "Pretty Paper" by Roy Orbison.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 I saw this amusing post online this morning:

And I saw that just as I was starting to think, "Hmmm, I wonder what I should post for my Christmas music of the day?" I love how every once in a while, the Interwebs anticipate my needs.

Here is some Johnny Cash for your wintry morning. (Well, very late autumn, I suppose is technically correct...and as I look outside at this moment there's not much "winter" in evidence yet. We're having one of those years where winter seems to be a slow developing thing, as opposed to other years where at some point in October or early November winter shows up to shout "HEY! I'M HERE!!!" as it wallops us with snow. Right now it's just eternally damp and muddy. What were we talking about? Oh yeah, Johnny Cash. Sorry about that; I'm writing this as the coffee is only just starting to kick in.)

There was always something special about Johnny Cash's voice that I could never put my finger on. It really shouldn't work, that gravelly baritone that doesn't always home in on the exact pitch the way a singer should. Sliding into a pitch instead of hitting it dead on is a standard device of country singing (Reba McIntyre and Garth Brooks are canonical examples of this technique), but what Cash does is...more than that. Sometimes he sounds like he's perfectly content to waver in the vicinity of the actual pitch without actually getting there. If you heard a young music student singing like that, you'd question their ability. When you hear Johnny Cash doing it, you know that you're listening to a master who is doing exactly as he wishes with his voice.

Most of all, though, that guy knew how to home in on the emotional content of a song and use his instrument to make it work. He never stresses the wrong word or puts the em-PHAS-is on the wrong syl-LAB-le, and he somehow makes it sound like every song he sings was written for him and him alone, no matter if he actually did write it or if it's an old standard like "White Christmas" that has been sung by everyone, some of whom are icons with every bit as much stature as Mr. Cash.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 My most beloved of composers, Hector Berlioz, was born 217 years ago today. While he is often noted (and mocked) for his use of bombast, he was actually very tasteful and strategic in his use of big sounds: Berlioz loved contrast, and he could (and did) write music of surprising delicacy and intimacy. A lot of that can be heard in his oratorio L'Enfance du Christ, which tells the story of Joseph, Mary, and Jesus's flight into Egypt after the Nativity. While Berlioz's music was often met with hostility from the composer's native Parisian audiences, L'Enfance du Christ was embraced from the start and for many years was one of the few works by Berlioz to receive regular performances at all, before the great reassessment of his genius took place in the middle of the 20th century, ninety-plus years too late for Berlioz himself to have enjoyed it.

The Shepherd's Chorus from this work is a common excerpt heard this time of year, but Berlioz is so much more engrossing when one listens to the entire piece, so here it is.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 From Mame, which I have never seen and know [Ed: Apparently I can no longer spell] exactly nothing about other than this song, right here.

Oh, and the original Broadway:

And the Muppets:

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 Several settings of my mother's favorite Christmas carol. Enjoy! I'm never sure why this one isn't heard more than it is.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 Forty years ago tomorrow, I got up to get ready for school. My mother had Good Morning America or Today or one of those on in the living room, which is when I learned of what happened forty years ago today. John Lennon, shot dead in New York City.

It would be many years before I would finally warm up to the Beatles' music and the enormity of the act of cultural assault that Mark David Chapman committed that day.

Here is John Lennon.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 One area of classical music I always tell myself I would like to explore, and yet never quite do, is the operas of Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov. NRK was a brilliant orchestrator, a musical colorist who also had a fine gift of melody. His music teems with the sense of exotic color and adventure and emotion; his Scheherazade is one of the enduring works of orchestral magic.

I have read that NRK's operas constitute a treasure trove of storytelling and music, all based on the legends and fairy tales of Russia. The operas are not often staged, however, mainly because Russian is not one of the more popular languages for singers to learn, which is likely a pity. But we do have orchestral suites derived from NRK's operas, like this one, from an opera called...Christmas Eve. A light romp, this is not; the story involves a plot by the Devil to steal the moon, and it proceeds from there in what I am sure is delightfully operatic fashion.

This is an orchestral suite derived from the score to Christmas Eve, and if it doesn't make use of any traditional musical trappings of this season -- no jingle bells here! -- it nevertheless creates that wonderful sense of NRK's grand orchestrations and music that is full of rhythmic excitement and emotion.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

 You know how sometimes a song will have a great tune and a great beat, but when you listen to the lyrics you're kind of repulsed? For me one great example of this is the first of the 1980s pop music charity hits, "Do They Know It's Christmastime", by "Band-Aid", a super-group made up of a whole lot of big names at the time. The song is basically asking if the starving Africans have any idea that it's even Christmastime, so awful has their lot become. I'm always thinking, "Why wouldn't they? They have calendars. Just because they're dealing with a lot of shit doesn't mean they don't know what the date is." And besides, there are a lot of Christians in Africa too. The whole song always bugs me (and not just for Bono's lyric, "Well tonight thank God it's them, instead of you!" Yikes.)

Anyway, yes, they know it's Christmastime in Africa. Here's some musical evidence.