I love traditional Christmas music as much as anybody, but it’s also fun to hear Christmas music performed on non-traditional instruments! Here are a couple of selections of such:
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Another song I feature annually: Dan Fogelberg’s Same Old Lang Syne. For my thoughts on this song, I refer you to this old post. Suffice it to say that this song’s bittersweet nature appeals to me more and more with every passing year.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Oddly, I cannot conceive of the Christmas Season without The Nutcracker, and yet to this day, I have never attended a live performance of the ballet. This is something I very much need to correct one of these years! But I was fortunate to play principal trumpet in my college orchestra for four years, each one of which saw The Nutcracker Suite on our Christmas program. Few pieces of music transport me to a specific time and place, but The Nutcracker Suite to me is always brightly-lit rehearsal halls as another icy Iowa winter revs up outside through those tall windows, with Maestro Janice Wade leading the orchestra (and always, always, always yelling at us for trying to slow down, in spite of the complete lack of instruction to do so in the score, at the end of the “Waltz of the Flowers.”
Anyhow, I’ll give you two options here! If you have time, give the entire ballet a listen! I’m always of the belief that given the choice between hearing the entire work and hearing extracts, one should hear the entire work. But if you don’t have time, the Suite is perfectly acceptable. Here are both: the whole thing, and the Suite.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Something for Thursday
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Wow…today is the birthday of the Chairman of the Board himself, Mr. Frank Sinatra! He would have been 104 today. What a star he was! There’s never been a time when his voice wasn’t a part of my life. One of the songs I remember most from when I was very young was a Sinatra song.
Here’s something I found earlier today: a complete episode of a Dean Martin teevee show, with Frank Sinatra joining along with a bunch of family members. This was recorded more than fifty years ago, and it’s sobering to see a number featuring Sinatra’s and Martin’s sons Frank Jr. and Ricci, and to know that both of those men–young, good-looking fellows here–have also died.
Enjoy!
(Long-time readers of mine may notice that late in the show here, Mr. Sinatra sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”…without the lyric change that Sinatra himself later foisted upon the world, totally changing the feel of the song! Amazing!)
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Tone Poem Tuesday
If you’re familiar with the work of Robert Russell Bennett, you’re almost certainly familiar with the work he did using the tunes and melodies of other composers. And if you have any love of American musical theater of the 20th century, then you’re almost certainly familiar with the work of Robert Russell Bennett, and you may not even realize it! Bennett was largely known for his work as an arranger and orchestrator for many of the great Broadway shows of the classic era of American musical theater. Look at the fine print of many of those albums and you’ll see something along the lines of “Arrangements by Robert Russell Bennett” or “Orchestrations by Russell Bennett”.
Bennett also arranged many fine orchestral suites of Broadway music, which have become staples in the repertoire of Pops orchestras all over the world. Bennett’s suites are almost always fine compositions in their own right, with Bennett giving a lot of thought to the melodies and how they should sound in a purely orchestral setting. The suites are more than worth listening to on their own, proving that dramatic music does not always need to be heard in its original context to be effective.
Here is the Porgy and Bess: A Symphonic Picture by Robert Russell Bennett. Enjoy!
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Today’s featured piece is apparently really obscure, and it really shouldn’t be. At all. Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of the most revered British composers of the 20th century, and a lot of his music is not only frequently heard but in the standard repertory. So why is his masque On Christmas Night, a work inspired by Dickens’s A Christmas Carol so unknown? I only discovered it purely by accident last week while listening to one of RVW’s more famous Christmas-themed works. On Christmas Night wasn’t even recorded at all until 2006, when Richard Hickox led the City of London Sinfonia, chorus, and soloists. Googling the piece didn’t turn up much more, and the only in-depth information I was able to find comes from a review on Classical.Net, which I excerpt here:
Michael Kennedy’s standard book on the composer’s life and works doesn’t mention it, except in the catalogue. This is its very first recording. Vaughan Williams called it a “masque,” mainly because he hated the ballet’s dancing on point, and he appropriated Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” as its basis. He also drastically telescoped Dickens’s plot. It’s Vaughan Williams light, but “light” doesn’t mean “slight.”
On Christmas Night is wonderfully dramatic as it traces Dickens’s tale, and as it’s clearly meant to be used for a dance company, RVW alternates between beauty and coldness and drama and austere mystery, with familiar Christmas songs scattered throughout. After playing On Christmas Night through several times over the last week or so, I cannot fathom how it has so completely eluded the concert halls and ballet stages of the world since RVW wrote it in 1926. I hope you enjoy it! Here is On Christmas Night.