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.