Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Today's featured piece is apparently really obscure, and it really shouldn't be. At all. Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of the most revered British composers of the 20th century, and a lot of his music is not only frequently heard but in the standard repertory. So why is his masque On Christmas Night, a work inspired by Dickens's A Christmas Carol so unknown? I only discovered it purely by accident last week while listening to one of RVW's more famous Christmas-themed works. On Christmas Night wasn't even recorded at all until 2006, when Richard Hickox led the City of London Sinfonia, chorus, and soloists. Googling the piece didn't turn up much more, and the only in-depth information I was able to find comes from a review on Classical.Net, which I excerpt here:

Michael Kennedy's standard book on the composer's life and works doesn't mention it, except in the catalogue. This is its very first recording. Vaughan Williams called it a "masque," mainly because he hated the ballet's dancing on point, and he appropriated Dickens's "Christmas Carol" as its basis. He also drastically telescoped Dickens's plot. It's Vaughan Williams light, but "light" doesn't mean "slight."

On Christmas Night is wonderfully dramatic as it traces Dickens's tale, and as it's clearly meant to be used for a dance company, RVW alternates between beauty and coldness and drama and austere mystery, with familiar Christmas songs scattered throughout. After playing On Christmas Night through several times over the last week or so, I cannot fathom how it has so completely eluded the concert halls and ballet stages of the world since RVW wrote it in 1926. I hope you enjoy it! Here is On Christmas Night.

Scenes of Almost-Winter

As I write this we're about eleven days or so from the start of winter. I live in the Buffalo area, though, and winter is starting to show itself, like an impatient performer eager to take the stage. In fact, around here the last third of autumn really tends to be indistinguishable from autumn. We're not blanketed with a snowpack that will last months just yet, but it's coming. Meantime, here is a set of wintry images from Western New York. The first photo is from November 3; the last from yesterday.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Enya.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

OK, so after a really busy day of errands and whatnot yesterday I suddenly remembered about 11:00pm that I hadn't posted a Daily Dose, so I went with a comedy number by Johnny Carson that I use every year. But that's far from the only comedic take on The Twelve Days of Christmas! Nope, not at all. In fact, it's probably more common to hear comedic takes on that old carol than to hear the thing actually performed straight. Cases in point:











This one here is particularly neat if you're a music history buff:



And what about twelve days after Christmas?


And if you must hear "12 Days" performed perfectly nicely with no comedy attached, here you go:

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

One of my favorite Christmas comedy bits:

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Even now it comes as a surprise to a lot of people that the trumpet isn't just an instrument for blazing fanfares and astonishing brass coluratura fireworks. The trumpet can be a deeply lyrical instrument as well, as is heard in this short selection by the amazing Tine Thing Helseth. Here is Ms. Helseth with "In the Bleak Midwinter".

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

So tonight I get to go see a live performance by the biggest star I will ever have seen live: Celine Dion! In that case, we'd better hear some of her Christmas work, right?

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Scottish singer and songwriter Dougie MacLean has been a favorite artist of mine for years, but I only just today learned that he wrote a Christmas song of his own. And here it is!

Tone Poem Tuesday

So this week we conclude our trip through Dvorak's trio of tone poems that he called "Nature, Life, and Love" with the Othello Overture. There was some definite Shakespearean inspiration for Dvorak here, but it's not wise to try to find exact correspondences in the music to the drama. The overture is definitely more stormy and takes a darker tone than the previous two installments in this trio of overtures. For a work whose alternate title indicates that what is being explored is love, it certainly seems that Dvorak has a view of love that doesn't exclude that emotion's more introspective and combative elements.

Here is Dvorak's Othello Overture.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas!

Here are some selections from the album The Bells of Dublin, a Christmas album by The Chieftains and various other artists. Enjoy! (The third selection is a bit of Christmas-themed gallows humor, if you thought that such a thing could exist!)

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

One of the great sopranos left us just a couple of months ago: Jessye Norman, who died September 30 at 74 years of age. Norman was not only an amazing singer with the kind of voice that could fill a cathedral, but she was also extremely versatile, refusing to be typecast or limited in the roles she was able to perform or music she was able to sing. (She was even quoted at one point as saying "Pigeonholes are for pigeons." Norman had impeccable dramatic control of her voice at all times, and she sang with a stunning clarity that was always something amazing to hear.

This song was actually written for Jessye Norman, by composer Donald Fraser. I haven't been able to find a whole lot of information about it, but Fraser might have written it while at a party at which Norman was guest of honor. The song's title is "This Christmastide", but it is also apparently known as "Jessye's Carol". Enjoy!

Memories of a Map

When I was a kid we had a map on the wall of the United States. I haven't thought of that map in years, until...well, I'll get to that.

The Wife and I just got back from a one-night trip to Rochester, where one of the things we did was shop at a very large antique mall. One reason I love antiquing, in addition to the fact that you can really get some unique items, is that each thing there has a memory of some kind attached to it. Not necessarily mine, but in this age of disposable stuff hanging from hooks in clamshell plastic boxes in stores, to look at things that belonged to someone once is pretty special. And if I can find an item that matches something I used to own, well, that's definitely special. Many times when I'm antiquing I'll see something--a particular set of cookie cutters, for example, or maybe a movie tie-in drinking glass that Burger King once sold, a glass that we actually had. When I see an antique item for sale that we used to own, it transports me instantly. It doesn't matter in the least bit if the item in question is one that I haven't thought about in several decades.

I had that same experience last night while scrolling through Twitter. One person re-tweeted (for those not on Twitter, that's when you re-post something someone else said, to call it to the attention of people who are following your Twitter feed) a tweet from a person who apparently regularly visits estate sales. This person said the following:

I go estate sale shopping regularly and whenever I find an unfinished embroidery project I buy it and finish it bc there’s no way that soul is resting with an unfinished project left behind. One day I found this stunner for $5.

She went on to tell a story about a series of embroidered quilt squares that she found, and her desire to buy all those squares and finish that quilt. That's a very lovely thought, but what stopped me in my tracks was the photo that accompanied the tweet quoted above. She refers to "this stunner", and the stunner was this embroidered map of the United States:

That is what stopped me cold.

My grandmother, you see, embroidered that very map for my family. It hung on our wall for years, but eventually...I honestly don't know. I suppose it went the route of many such things as the years passed and as we moved from house to house to house before finally settling. I couldn't even tell you reliably which house was the last one we lived in when I remember seeing this map on the wall, but...it was there, for a long time.

And I have never once thought about that old embroidered US map at all, not one single time, in all the years from whenever the last time I looked at it as a kid was to this very day. When it just showed up, quite entirely randomly, in my Twitter feed.

You never know what memories are lying around, buried deep enough to not be recalled but not so deep that a single image seen while lazily scrolling some corner of the Internet can't jolt it back to the present, as if that memory had never been mislaid in the first place.

The person who posted about that embroidered map is Shannon Downey of Badass Cross Stitch. You can read the account of her finding the map on her twitter feed, here. Just keep scrolling down.

Your Daily Dose of Christmas

Wow, it's December already! I remember when I was a kid having adults tell me how much quicker the years go by when you're older, and like every other kid I suppose, I pretty much blew off that wisdom at the time. After all, it stood in such blazing contrast to my own experience, when the years just ground on by, when the concept of "a year from now" seemed like an eternity. And now...here I am, a mere 48 years old with hopefully quite a few to go, and I find myself sitting here on December 1 saying, "Ye Gods, where did my year go?" Another year over...what have I done?

Those are thoughts for another day...but for now, as December dawns, here is Melissa Ethridge singing the words of John Lennon.

Tone Poem Tuesday

This week we have the second part of Dvorak's trilogy of tone poems that he called "Nature, Life, and Love": the "Carnival" overture. This overture launches into a dance-like rhythm from the very opening bars, and its energy almost never abates throughout, and by the time the work ends nine minutes or so later,you can almost hear the wild dancers in a village square exhaling with relief as they are finally allowed to fall, gasping, to the ground as the orchestra's work ends. As a representation of the sheer energy and joy of life that often inhabits Dvorak's music, the "Carnival" overture is unusually potent.

Something for Thursday

How about some Star Trek music!

Specifically, the incidental music from an episode of The Original Series. More specifically, the episode Metamorphosis.

If you've never seen this particular episode, I can't recommend it highly enough; I consider it Star Trek at its best. In the episode a mysterious energy field takes over a shuttlecraft on which Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Dr. McCoy are en route back to the Enterprise after picking up an ambassador named Nancy Hedford, because the ambassador has contracted a rare disease and has to receive treatment. The energy field diverts the shuttle to an uncharted planet which is home to a single human man, and it turns out that this man is Zefram Cochrane, inventor of the warp drive and a man who should be dead because he lived something like two hundred years prior to the episode. We learn that he was brought to this planet by that energy field, and that the field has brought Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the ambassador there to provide Cochrane with companionship.

After some ill-fated attempts at escape, Kirk and company realize that the energy field (which Cochrane calls "The Companion") is actually female (keep in mind, this show was written by 1960s views on gender roles) and considers itself Cochrane's lover. They try to convince The Companion to let them go, with Kirk pointing out that since Cochrane and the Companion are different species, they can never truly love. The Companion merges with Ambassador Hedford, curing her disease and thus becoming human, and as Kirk and company depart, Cochrane and Hedford/the Companion are settling in for a lifetime together.

Setting aside the 1960s notions of love and gender, Metamorphosis is one of the finest science fiction love stories I know, relying on insight and discussion over phasers and fistfights. It also boasts a deeply lovely and finely textured music score by George Duning which highlights the otherworldly nature of the beings involved and the hesitant wonder of their first steps into the world of love. This suite was apparently edited together by someone with good sound processing abilities, even if they weren't entirely able to isolate the music from the occasional sound effects of the show. Enjoy!

Tone Poem Tuesday

Let's check in on Antonin Dvorak, shall we? He's always good for a solid listen, and today's work is no exception. It's the concert overture In Nature's Realm, which Dvorak composed as part of a trilogy of concert overtures. The entire trilogy was called Nature, Life, and Love, but Dvorak eventually split the three component works of the trilogy up, resulting in the present work, Carnival, and Othello. We'll hear the other two in due course, but In Nature's Realm is a typically wonderful Dvorak work, full of pastoral beauty, natural lyricism, and that ever-typical Dvorakian energy and momentum. Like most of this composer's works, there is a sense of proportion that hews throughout, and the opening passages with answering motifs that sound like horn calls as they build to the first big statement suggest the magic of a sunrise in verdant hills.

Antonin Dvorak is the type of composer to whom I like to return when the air is coldest and the sky darkest, if that makes sense. He reminds me of warmer and sunnier days. Here is his In Nature's Realm overture.

Tone Poem Tuesday

Oddly, given my love of Sergei Rachmaninov, it's odd that I've heard this particular work of his only a couple of times, and not at all in the last five or six years. "The Rock" is a tone poem Rachmaninov wrote early in his career, when he was just twenty years old. The piece is surprisingly impressionistic and colorful for a composer who would later be known for achingly lyrical post-Romanticism, but the work also displays Rachmaninov's skill for orchestration, all the more surprising for a composer so strongly associated with the piano (contrasting with, say, Franz Liszt, whose orchestrations were occasionally bound by his deep understanding of the piano).

The Rock is partially based on a fragment of poetry:

The golden cloud slept through the night
Upon the breast of the giant-rock

The piece also draws (according to the composer) from a Chekhov short story in which a man, stuck in a blizzard, tells a young woman the story of his life and his struggles. There is certainly that kind of brooding at work here in this piece...but of course there's brooding. We're talking about Sergei Rachmaninov here.

Here is The Rock.

Something for Thursday

I just read a short while ago that Valerie Heywood, a violist with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, recently passed away suddenly and unexpectedly. Harper served with the orchestra as principal violist from 1991 to 2017, and she remained with the orchestra after stepping down from the Principal Viola chair. The viola has always been my personal favorite of the string family for a number of reasons, but I am chiefly drawn to its mid-range tone between the soaring heights of the violins and the tenor body of the cellos. The viola tends to be overlooked a lot of the time, and while the concert literature abounds with great concerted works for violin and cello, there are fewer such pieces for the viola, so when the violist gets a chance to shine, it's usually a special moment. The solo viola is used to amazing effect in Berlioz's second symphony, Harold in Italy, but that work isn't a concerto designed to exhibit the violist's skill but rather a symphony where the solo violist is an extra, added voice that adds perspective to the symphony's action.

Here, offered in remembrance of Valerie Heywood, is the Viola Sonata in D minor by Mikhail Glinka. Thank you for your musical gifts, Ms. Heywood.

Tone Poem Tuesday

After the month of dark and grim and scary and brooding music, let's return to something a bit lighter, shall we? This duofold selection is one of the most beloved opera extracts of all time; in fact, this selection is so popular that it has almost completely overshadowed the actual opera from which it comes. The Polka and Fugue from Schwanda the Bagpiper is nine minutes of pure delight. The opera was written by Jaromir Weinberger, a Czech composer who later emigrated to the United States. Weinberger was apparently prolific, but only this particular opera lives on of all his works, and that only occasionally. The Polka and Fugue is a mainstay of concert halls and recordings, though. It's quite an orchestral showpiece and a complex bit of contrapuntal writing (apparently a particular strength of Weinberger as a composer), and this performance especially puts the "showpiece" aspects of the work on display. You should listen to this with the sound up a bit, if you can; this is vintage Chicago Symphony Orchestra when Fritz Reiner was at the helm. The former trumpet player in me thrills at these old recordings, hearing Adolph Herseth soaring above it all. Just try not to dwell too much on the fact that the photo of Reiner on the video itself shows him as he apparently always looked: as if the joy was a concept completely alien to him. Reiner was by all accounts an absolute tyrant on the podium, and if there are any personal stories about him that show his warmth and humor I've yet to read them, but the man was able to pour warmth and joy and humanity into his musicmaking.

Enjoy the "Polka and Fugue" from Schwanda the Bagpiper!

Bad Joke Friday

A curious new establishment sprang up on the summit of Mount Olympus overnight. Where once the Gods would sit, there was now a fast-casual bakery-cafe featuring salads, sandwiches, bagels, and soup in bread bowls, staffed entirely by satyrs playing reed pipes. The Era of Zeus was over. The Pan Era had begun.