Christmas Carols

Advent Calendar – Christmas Eve 2020

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On Christmas Eve a return to Christmas Carols at Kings. A clip of Oh Come All Ye Faithful, from this evening’s Covid Careful pared down service, with just the boys and the King’s singers and no congregation. I watched it before I went to cook dinner and it did feel rather muted; a reminder that our great churches should be filled with people. So the second clip is the rousing Hark The Herald Angles Sing from more normal times.

BBC Two – Carols from King’s, 2020, O Come All Ye Faithfulhttps://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0923ffl

King’s College Cambridge 2011 #17 Hark the Herald Angels Sing – YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_iLXNSIaYc

Happy Christmas

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Advent Calendar – Sunday Twentieth of December

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Today peep through the window to a traditional Christmas scene, carols from King’s College Cambridge. The choir are singing ‘The Angle Gabriel’ and you can see what happens to sweet little choir boys when they grow up in the second YouTube video.

The Angel Gabriel : Kings College, Cambridge – YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pliqObTHxUQ&feature=emb_logo

You can listen to A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast live at 3pm on BBC Radio 4 on Christmas Eve, as it has been since 1928. Patrick Magee, the senior chorister, wrote casually of this first broadcast in his journal “Christmas Eve. Practice 10-12.45. Go out to dinner with Mum and Dad. Carol service broadcasted. Comes off well. I read a lessons and sing a solo in ‘Lullay’.” You can watch the carols later on BBC 2 at 5.30pm. This Covid year the choir will be socially distanced and there will be no congregation, I wonder how different that will look and sound?

Carols From King’s: How a tradition was made (theartsdesk.com)https://www.theartsdesk.com/books-classical-music/carols-kings-how-tradition-was-made

THE KING’S SINGERS The angel Gabriel – Basilica S.Nicolò di Lecco 2 dicembre 2019 – YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gdHcNkSe5W4

Advent Calendar – Friday Eleventh of December

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The Gesualdo Six is a vocal consort formed in March 2014 . I first saw them on Facebook, actually I’ve only seen them on Facebook, but when they pop up it’s a lovely peaceful interlude amongst the other Facebook rubbish or the Christmas hype, or this year an escape from Covid and Brexit. Visit them on Facebook to see them singing a German Christmas Carol. The picture is of one of my favourite cathedrals, Lincoln, where one of the group was a choirboy. At the top of the city it looks wonderful illuminated for Christmas.

Facebookhttps://www.facebook.com/100044503806539/videos/3555992441124775

Meet the team

Advent Calendar – Wednesday Ninth of December

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Today finds Elf in contemplative mood so the window opens in King’s College Chapel, Cambridge University; a place inextricably associated with Christmas. For over a hundred years A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols has been broadcast on the radio and more recently on television, from here to millions of people around the world.

King’s College Chapel | King’s College Cambridgehttps://www.kings.cam.ac.uk/chapel/

Listen to one of my favourite composers and one of my favourite singers. Fantasia On Christmas Carols by Ralph Vaughan Williams, sung by Roderick Williams.

Short Biography – Ralph Vaughan Williams Society (rvwsociety.com)https://rvwsociety.com/short-biography/

Ralph Vaughan Williams was a composer of great importance for English music. He was born on 12 October 1872 in a Cotswold village. At the turn of the century he was among the first to travel into the countryside to collect folk songs and carols from singers, notating them for future generations. He died on 26 August 1958; his ashes are interred in Westminster Abbey, near Purcell. In his long and very productive life music of every genre flowed in profusion.

佛漢威廉斯：聖誕頌幻想曲 Vaughan Williams: Fantasia On Christmas Carols – YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxgBirZx_VE

Advent Calendar – Sunday Sixth of December

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Sunday Smiles in today’s window and I hope this carol brings a smile. Sally at Smorgasbord featured it last year and though I knew the carol I had not heard this version and I kept playing it again. To enjoy to the full watch on the largest screen possible. My desktop has a television for a screen – no not a huge widescreen, but just about large enough to contain the Mormon Tabernacle Choir singing Carol of the Bells. And everything about this is big and joyful, it’s got everything. Many of us have missed singing in choirs or listening to them so I hope you enjoy this. Let us know if you have ever seen the Mormon Tabernacle Choir live, I wish I had been there.

Carol of the Bells – Mormon Tabernacle Choir – YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-W2Bkz_Rno

Advent Calendar – Thursday Third of December

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Bethlehem Down

Christmas always has a touch of winter melancholy, especially this year and one of my favourite carols for enjoying a touch of melancholy is Bethlehem Down, made more interesting and poignant by the story behind it

Peter Warlock was the pseudonymn of Philip Heseltine (1894–1930), his choice of Warlock reflected his interest in occult practices!   Bethlehem Down was created in a mood of flippancy due to the impecunious state of Warlock and his poet friend Bruce Blunt – both notorious for their Bohemian behaviour. They hoped to earn enough money to get suitably drunk at Christmas; the carol was completed in a few days and published (words and music) in The Daily Telegraph on Christmas Eve.  Their plan had worked and they had ‘an immortal carouse on the proceeds’.

But Warlock’s career as a composer, music scholar and critic was cut short; towards the end of his life he became depressed by a loss of creative inspiration and died in his London flat of coal gas poisoning in 1930, probably suicide.

Bethlehem Down – YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=yefnj5kvJTw

But elves do not bring melancholy with them – though don’t you hate them hanging around in the kitchen when you are trying to cook?