Clipping blog

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Share my Christmas Tradition: Handel’s Messiah on Christmas Night Posted: 25 Dec 2011 02:38 PM PST One of my personal Christmas traditions (and I have a few) involves a little quiet, a pair of headphones, and a superlative recording of Messiah by Georg Frederich Handel. I do not believe a greater work of exultation and worship has ever been written and Christmas would simply not be the same without it. I can’t give you the whole work here, though if you’re interested in the version I like the most, it is this one, directed by Andrew Davis and performed by the Toronto Symphony and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. Yes, I know Messiah should be performed by a small chamber group with period instruments (Hey, look! Sir Neville Mariner and the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields with soprano Elly Ameling!), but I like my Messiah huge, with a big orchestra and choir so the grand pieces are truly grand. Davis’ version is perfect, and also includes Kathleen Battle as the Soprano soloist. If that’s the wrong way to hear this piece, I don’t want to know from right. Okay, enough talk. Let’s hear some music. I decided to pull out a few of my favorite parts of Messiah for your listening pleasure this evening. What follows are “And the Glory of the Lord”, “His Yoke is Easy”, “Hallelujah”, and the finale “Worthy is the Lamb / Amen”. The first two are by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Choir directed by the incomparable Robert Shaw and the latter come from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Plug in your headphones, close your eyes, turn it up, and enjoy. Merry Christmas!

A Little Bach to Extend the Christmas Spirit Posted: 25 Dec 2011 02:04 PM PST I think this evening I’m going to post a couple videos, just to keep the Christmas spirit around for a few extra hours. There’s no need to rush into the end of the year, is there? NRO’s Michael Potemra noted the return of several renaissance-era Christmas Masses to churches in New York City, and wrote a but about why such transcendent music is still necessary today. But whether a Midnight Mass features the compositions of Victoria, Haydn, or Richard Shephard, the music is a potent symbol of the underlying feast itself. Just as music touches the eternal by communicating thoughts too deep for human speech, this annual celebration proclaims the faith of Christian believers that a Word deeper than our words broke in upon human reality. Bill Buckley said about J. S. Bach that his music "disturbs human complacency because one can't readily understand finiteness in its presence," and that observation is true in an eminent way of Bach, mankind's greatest composer. (In the same column, WFB quoted Carl Sagan quoting the biologist Lewis Thomas, when asked what message we should send aboard a spaceship to extraterrestrials, should any such be encountered: "I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach . . . but that would be boasting.") Still, while Bach's achievement is an outlier, even the works of much humbler musical figures point toward transcendence, toward a different order that coexists with — and irrupts into — the one we take for granted; an order beyond words. I will add nothing to this save this performance of the opening piece of Bach’s Magnificat directed by Nicholas Harnoncourt. Though the work is not strictly a Christmas piece nowadays, he originally wrote it for Vespers and it borrows its text from the canticle of Mary, in Latin, as told in the book of Luke. So it fits nicely.

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