NWCS Christmas Concert 2022 Program Notes
This evening’s concert program, “What sweeter music”, is envisioned as a musical tour of the sounds and themes of the holiday season. We’ll celebrate Christmas and the New Year with some old, familiar carols and some new favorites; we’ll take a moment to celebrate the timeless wonder of snow, and paint a vast sonic portrait of a frozen winter landscape; and we’ll perform two masterworks of the season by composers who, while probably equal in renown, represent nearly opposite ends of the musical spectrum.
We hope you find music that speaks to you on this program, and we think you’ll find it especially meaningful to follow along with the texts printed in this program as we sing them, especially when we’re not singing in English.
David Willcocks was the Organist-Choirmaster at King’s College Chapel, a tenure spanning the middle of the 20th century and remembered as a particularly “Golden Age” of choral singing at King’s. He was most well-known for leading the annual Service of Lessons and Carols for Advent and for Christmas. The LP recordings and radio broadcasts are legendary. He arranged many carols for choir and organ, also writing glorious arrangements with descants of carols for the congregations to sing at these services. His
arrangement of the Sussex Carol, a traditional English carol, features a sparkling organ accompaniment accompanying brilliant and imaginative choral writing.
Bruce Tippette’s setting of Robert Frost’s immortal poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, is lovely and melodic, painting a vivid scene of travel by horse-drawn carriage in winter. A colorful piano accompaniment uses cascades of sixteenth-notes to evoke the image of falling snow, and the composer makes imaginative use of rhythm to help bring Frost’s words to life.
Johann Pachelbel was a German composer, organist, and teacher who brought the south German organ schools to their peak. He composed a large body of sacred and secular music, which enjoyed enormous popularity during his lifetime; he had many pupils and his music became a model for the composers of south and central Germany. Today, Pachelbel is best known for the Canon in D; other well known works include the Chaconne in F minor, the Toccata in E minor for organ, and the Hexachordum Apollinis, a set of
keyboard variations. Little is known about the Magnificat in D, a chamber work scored only for 4-part chorus and basso continuo. It’s an intimate setting of the Magnificat text that employs a different
compositional approach to each section of text: there are loud dynamics contrasted with soft ones; sections of florid counterpoint followed by stark homophony; and textures that are serious and somber as well as bright and celebratory. In addition to helping to illuminate the meaning of the words, this technique of contrast has the advantage of keeping the work feeling fresh and moving forward. A fughetta-like passage of imitative counterpoint brings the work to a thrilling conclusion.
John Rutter, England’s most prolific composer of church music, may well be the most-performed arranger of Christmas carols in the world. With a melodic, singable style that’s instantly recognizable, he is equally beloved for his original carols as for his arrangements. In What sweeter music, (from which poem our concert program takes its title!) Rutter sets Robert Herrick’s exquisite poem to music of charm and grace.
A lyrical melody repeats in various voices and the setting is lovely in its text-painting. Shepherd’s Pipe Carol is a light and rhythmic carol which tells the Christmas story from the point of view of a young shepherd boy.
Pavel Chesnokoff was an Imperial Russian and Soviet composer, choral conductor and teacher. He composed over five hundred choral works, over four hundred of which are sacred. Today, he is most known for Salvation is Created as well as works such as Do Not Reject Me in Old Age (solo for basso profondo) and movements from various settings of the Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom.
Olá Gjeilo is one of the world’s foremost living choral composers. His work can be found in the repertoire of virtually every major choral group, and his uniquely-personal yet accessible compositional style offers choirs and audiences alike a musical experience that is at once challenging and relatable. Tundra is a vast sonic depiction of a frozen winter scene, which uses the chorus and piano as equal musical partners as they weave their harmonies in and out of one another.
Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), one of the most important French composers of the 20th century, composed brilliantly in every genre. Towards his middle age he was greatly affected by the sudden deaths of two friends and experienced an intense spiritual wakening, resulting in a more profound and richly layered composing style. He began composing sacred music and, in the late 1940s, his great opera Dialogues des Carmelites, based on a play by Georges Bernanos. Here, we have three of the Four Motets for Christmastime, completed in 1952. These exquisite miniatures paint colourful scenes from the nativity story. O magnum mysterium is the most profound: slow and somewhat simple, it grows in intensity toward the final repetition of the main text. The quiet, clear refrain of Videntes stellam evokes a quiet, starry night, through which the Magi travel with building excitement; this reaches a rich climax as they enter the stable and present their gifts. In the final motet, Hodie Christus natus est, the faithful make their response to the news with
unbridled exuberance: ‘Gloria in excelsis Deo’.
Peter Warlock’s setting of the carol Bethlehem Down is a lesser-known gem of the Christmas season. Each verse is set to a repeating melody, underpinned by a steadily-shifting harmonic progression that calls to mind the chill and stillness of Christmas Night, and the simple beauty of the Nativity.
Many of England’s greatest musicians have begun their musical training in the choirs of its great cathedrals and churches – Byrd, Gibbons, Tallis, Purcell, Stanford, Parry, Elgar, and Howells, to name a few. The magnificent musical education provided by these choir schools came in the form of on-the-spot, daily training, giving those boys an incomparable background and knowledge. William Walton was a chorister at Christ Church, Oxford, from 1912-18, and it was natural that much of his most beautiful music was written for choirs, though he was active across a variety of genres, including some of the major English orchestral works of the 20th century. What cheer? is a rhythmic and charming carol set to a 16th Century text
celebrating the New Year.