There is some dispute over when Christmas decorations should
be taken down; notwithstanding the customary crop of sad individuals who are
rolled out every year on television magazine programmes to claim that they
celebrate Christmas every day of the year.
Common belief is that 12th night - the Eve of the Feast of
the Epiphany, January 6th – is the time when the decorations go into
hiding. However, when I was a student we
used to frequent a pub run by devout Catholics who maintained that Christmas
only properly ended at the Feast of Candlemas
- February 2nd – and studiously left their decorations up
until then. There was something infinitely
depressing about Christmas decorations hanging on so far beyond Christmas, especially
in a pub where the atmosphere was badly polluted by cigarette smoke (smoking
was not so much allowed as positively expected in pubs in those heady
days).
Always a fan of Jeremy Backhouse’s Vasari Singers, I have to
say I think they excelled themselves with their Christmas CD this year. Released on the Naxos label (titled A Winter's Light and with the catalogue number 8.573030), it is an object
lesson in how to create atmosphere and warmth within the tiny time-frame of 20
Christmassy songs. One of the longest
things here is Walford Davies’s mini-cantata O little Town of Bethlehem (with an amazingly fragile sounding
Susan Waton intoning the extended soprano solo introduction) which lasts all of
five and half minutes – exceeded only on the disc by Harold Darke’s eternally
lovely In the Bleak Mid-Winter which
runs a full 10 seconds more.
I am profoundly impressed by their relaxed, discreet and beautifully
measured account of Howells’s divine Sing
Lullaby, while my all-time favourite Christmas carol, Pierre Villette’s Hymne à la Vierge, gets about the most
spine-tinglingly gorgeous performance imaginable. God forbid, I am even impressed by their soothing
account of Rutter’s Nativity Carol (although
here my admiration is focused more on Martin Ford’s beautifully sympathetic
accompaniment on the awkward-sounding organ of Tonbridge School), and as for
the glutinous pops from Bob Chilcott, Gabriel Jackson and the gang, even they
exude a pleasing luminosity in these superb performances. Most interestingly, the handful of really
silly numbers – including a mock-swingle Jingle
Bells arranged by Ben Parry and a
pseudo-Spiritual version of I Believe in
Father Christmas with unapologetic references to Prokofiev by Jonathan
Rathbone – do not stick in the throat as they usually would. The music is often pretty dire, but as an
object lesson in how musical drivel can be elevated by a sensitive and
intelligent performance, this is a priceless disc.
Those feelings of depression are re-ignited whenever I hear
Christmas music after Christmas. It has
always saddened me that the plethora of fine, warm and evocative music so welcoming
in the run up to Christmas, seems so hollow and out of place almost as soon as
Boxing Day is over; all that effort for so little exposure! I am especially conscious of the ephemeral
quality of so much Christmas music when I get down to my post-Christmas
cataloguing of CDs. Always the recipient
of several dozen Christmas discs, it’s only in early January that I get round
to cataloguing them and putting them on shelves, and while, in the usual course
of events, whenever I do my cataloguing I usually dip into the discs to pass
the time while undertaking the onerous duty of typing everything into the database,
I studiously avoid listening when doing the Christmas discs. It’s all just too depressing.
This year I was obliged to listen through 2447 minutes and
52 seconds’ worth of Christmas CDs in the run up to December 25th.
That was not exceptional. Nor was the
fact that one of those discs (totalling 73 minutes and 48 seconds) got singled
out for special honours and spent the week of Christmas on my CD player. What is exceptional is that I am still
listening to it. Unquestionably it belongs
purely to Christmas, but it is just too lovely simply to go back on the shelf
and rot away until I decide to pull it out next December, so it’s going to be
there until Candlemas.![]() |
8.573030 |
I happened to get acquainted with one of the singers and director on FB just before the release of Vasari’s Winter Collection, december 2012. Although I did put the CD on my CD shelve after Christmas, I carry it with my all the time, because it’s a digital shelve (how can it not nowadays) I put it in. So I have access to my fave tracks at any time and where ever I am, like now for instance …
ReplyDeleteBest wishes from The Netherlands