Two more Christmas recommendations

      Following on from from my previous post, I'd like to recommend two pieces of Christmas listening, both musical.  Both also very northern.  I'll deal with the simplest first: Vaughan Williams's 'Fantasia on Christmas Carols' of 1912.  I do find this a deeply moving piece.  It is written for baritone soloist, chorus and orchestra.  All the carols are English; the three that are sung are perhaps less well known than the likes of 'O Come all ye faithful' and 'Hark the Herald Angels Sing'.  They are 'The Truth sent from Above', 'Come all ye Worthy Gentleman' and 'On Christmas night all Christians Sing' aka 'The Sussex Carol'.  All had been collected by likes from Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp.  The result is the most plangent of my two recommendations.  It has a deep untow of something close to melancholy, conveying the emptiness and biting cold of mid-winter. 

      The second piece is much more complex, being a reconstruction of a Lutheran Mass for Christmas Morning as it would have been celebrated in a north German city just before the Thirty Years War, from the period known as Lutheran Orthodoxy.  It too shares a sense of elusive profound silence and emptiness of Christmas in the north. This album, released (fittingly enough) by 'Deutsche Grammophon' of Hamburg, is the work of Paul McCreesh, the Gabrieli Quartet, the Gabrieli Players, and the Boys Choir & congregation of Roskilde Cathedral, Denmark, and it is an extraordinary endeavour, both in terms of scholarship & musicianship; sung in Latin, German, and a little bit of Greek and taking very nearly 1 hr 20 mins to perform - the Introit alone, sung in both German and Latin, takes 7.29 mins.  As originally celebrated such a service, with sermon and Holy Communion, could possibly have taken 3 hrs - the former apparently lasting an hour.  It really would be wrong to think that at the Reformation the new protestant churches all ditched the Latin.  Latin services in Lutheran Nuremberg, for instance, continued until the 1690s. Martin Luther himself said, "in no wise would I like to discontinue the service in the Latin language." Here in England and Wales services continued to by celebrated in Latin particularly at the Universities, and Holy Communion is still celebrated in Latin once at term at the University Church at Oxford.  Back now to the music.  The album concentrates on the church music of Michael Praetorius (1571-1621) with a couple of additional instrumental pieces by Heinrich Schutz and Samuel Sheidt.  It is difficult to select a favourite piece among an album of such riches; I have already mentioned the Introit 'Puer Natus in Bethlehem', and I should also like to mention the Gradual Hymn 'Von himmel hoch da komm ich her' and the knockout Recessional 'In Dulci Jubilo'.  The crown must however go Praetorius's 1619 setting of the 'German Sanctus' from Luther's 'Deutsche Messe' of 1526.  Extraordinary.

'A Ghost Story for Christmas'

     Well, here in the UK the terrestrial broadcasters, BBC & ITV, have released their Christmas Day schedules and they are quite simply appalling.  Perhaps the worst I have yet seen.*  They have added a little edge to this post which was to be in the way of a celebration of a remarkable, but relatively short lived television tradition from the 1970s, making it somewhat more into a valediction.  If you haven't seen any of the original series, please make the effort to do so. They are excellent.  You may be able to find them on Youtube, but the whole collection is available from the BFI as two box sets.

     In its original iteration, 'A Ghost Story for Christmas' was broadcast at some point during the Christmas period on BBC1 from 1971 until 1978 with a different drama presented each year.  The director was Lawrence Gordon Clarke and the producer (from 1973) was Rosemary Hill.  The first five productions were adaptations of work by that master of the ghost story M R James: 'The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral', 'A Warning to the Curious', 'Lost Hearts', 'The Treasure of Abbott Thomas', and finally in 1975 'The Ash Tree'. In the following year perhaps the most atmospheric of the series was aired, the Dickens short story 'The Signalman' in an adaptation by Andrew Davies.

     The final two dramas in the that first iteration were not literary adaptations but written specifically for the series: 'Stigma' in 1977, by Clive Exton and 'The Ice House', 1978, by John Bowen; the latter not directed by Lawrence Gordon Clarke, who had left the BBC in the previous year, but by Derek Lister.  Both have contemporary settings, and are not really ghost stories as such, and whatever their merits they lack the atmosphere of the previous dramas. 
     Those first six dramas, often cited by critics as examples of so-called 'Folk Horror', are quite remarkable for their ability to conjure up a certain atmosphere, a certain sensibility, and to do so out of limited resources. As Gordon Clarke said of them the 'focus [was] on suggestion. The aim, they say, is to chill rather than shock. Partly because television is not best suited to carrying off big-screen pyrotechnics, but mainly because they want to keep faith with the notion of a ghost story in its literary rather than cinematic tradition'.  There was, of course, no CGI in those days, and quite frankly they are all the better for it.  All were shot 16mm film on location, at some time in the midst of an English Autumn.  All these things may seem trivial enough, but they really are not.  God, after all, is in the details.  In addition the actors are really top-notch, eg Denholm Elliot and Bernard Lloyd in 'The Signalman', and excellent use is made of Classical music throughout.  In all, considered filmmaking at its best.  And very northern.

     In 1978/79 James Gordon Clarke went to Yorkshire television and made a very atmospheric adaptation of M R James's 'The Casting of the Runes' set in contemporary Leeds.  It starred Jan Francis and Ian Cuthbertson. (We have encountered Cuthbertson before when discussing Nigel Kneale's 'The Stone Tape'.) I believe it can still be found on 'YouTube'.  It too is well worth the watch.

* To clarify, having now seen the Christmas edition of the 'Radio Times' the BBC1 & ITV1 are indeed terrible.  The BBC2 schedule is a much better bet being a mixture of films, ballet and Morecambe & Wise.  What more could one want?