Rejoice in a festive meeting of old friends and new as you refill your creative reservoir heading into this wintery holiday season. Celebrate the season with unusual, rarely-heard music for the festivities; a program that balances novelty and tradition, mystery and jubilation, and familiar melodies with innovative new sounds. Our halls are decked and our voices are warmed! Special guest Kathryn Harms, harp.
Program
Hugo Distler, Variations on “Low How a Rose E’er Blooming,” op. 10
Benjamin Britten, Chorale After an old French Carol
Benjamin Britten, In The Bleak Mid-Winter (from A Boy Was Born)
John Jacob Niles, arr. Kim Robertson, I Wonder as I Wander (harp solo)
Giles Swayne, Magnificat
Jonathan Dove, The Three Kings
Franz Biebl, Ave Maria
Carols Old and New
Mexican carol, arr. Jeffrey Van, El Rorro (The Babe)
arr. Healey Willan, What is This Lovely Fragrance
Steven Sametz, Peace on Earth
arr. Thomas Edward Morgan, What Child is This?
David Carney, The Angel Gabriel
Michael Fink, What sweeter music
Featured Works on the Program
Hugo Distler, Chorale Variations on "Lo, How a Rose," op. 10
a light shining in the darkness
Despite a tragically foreshortened career, Hugo Distler (1908-1942) ranks among the leading figures of German sacred music in the first half of the last century. An illegitimate child raised by grandparents,…
Giles Swayne, Magnificat
the composer speaks
“My Magnificat was written in 1982 in response to a commission from Christ Church, Oxford, whose choir gave the first performance in July 1982 under Francis Grier. Since then it has…
Jonathan Dove, The Three Kings
written for Lessons and Carols at King's College
Jonathan Dove’s The Three Kings, a setting of Dorothy L Sayers, was commissioned for the 2000 Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols. Sayers’s division of the kings into three ages,…