And now, Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Tone Poem Tuesday
Let’s get right into 2024 with something familiar, and yet…not!
Rodion Shchedrin is a Soviet/Russian composer, born in 1932. He is still alive as of this writing, and he has apparently been a very productive and prolific composer over his lifetime. The work on tap today is a ballet he composed for his ballerina wife, Maya Plisetskaya, who died in 2015. The ballet is actually a re-imagining of Carmen, using melodies from the Bizet opera–but Shchedrin had put his own enormously creative stamp on these melodies that nearly everybody has heard, as he composes for string orchestra and percussion. It’s a fascinating listen, bringing something new and fresh to material that sometimes fails to be either of those things, so familiar has it all become.
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Coverage!
I didn’t really plan to skip Tone Poem Tuesday or Something For Thursday this week, it just kinda happened. There’s this meme that I see go around social media every year around this time, referring how the time between Christmas and New Years tends to be this amorphous period when you’re not even sure what day it is, and that’s certainly true! I’m actually taking the entirety of this week off this year, and after some reflection a few days ago, I’m realizing that I haven’t taken this particular week completely off–meaning, no school or work–since my last year of high school. After that, I would have a part-time job where I’d work during this time while off from college, and after college itself, I was simply working. I always take some time off during the Holidays, but never the whole kaboodle, as it were…until now. Next year I’ll most likely return to some “fractured” time off during the holidays, as this year’s week off was aided and abetted by the fact that Christmas and New Year’s fall on Mondays. In 2024/2025 those days will be Wednesdays, so next year will like be back-to-back five-day weekends, instead of one solid week off.
(And honestly, that’s kind of how I prefer it, anyway. I rarely take my vacations as entire weeks off, unless we have a trip planned or for some reason I need to take it as an entire week. This goes back to when I was working in restaurants right out of college; it’s always been easier to structure my vacations as a combination of two very-short work weeks broken in the middle by a really long weekend. Even now, I found last week interminably long, leading up to my ten days off.)
But anyway, back to the point: the regular music features of this blog will return next week. Meanwhile, here’s something I just found a minute ago, and it’s seasonally appropriate:
(BTW, the title of this post makes no sense because I forgot to change it! I was going to actually feature something else here, a cover I just found of a favorite Christmas song, but then I decided to feature this because it showed up right after the thing I was going to feature. I did bookmark the original thing for next year’s Daily Dose, though! Fret not! I’m leaving the post title, though. Just because.)
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Your Daily Dose of Christmas
Today it’s a Grab Bag of Christmas Music! In other words, stuff I usually feature and didn’t get to yet, and stuff I want to feature but don’t have a ton to say about it for now.
This next is an entire album!
Courtesy my Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra:
And finally, as the lights dim this night:
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas
I used to feature Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite here yearly, but a few years ago I added the entire ballet. And here it is, featuring the ballet and orchestra of the National Opera of the Ukraine.
This is an utterly gorgeous performance.
This performance of the Suite omits the Miniature Overture but includes the number that follows the Waltz of the Flowers, which is an interesting choice.
And as always, The Nutcracker makes me think of Dr. Janice Wade.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas!
Today, some Christmas-based classical music! We’ll start with an older favorite, the “Carol Symphony” by Victor Hely-Hutchinson:
Next is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Christmas Overture”. This is one of those “performances while distancing” that abounded in the high days of the COVID pandemic. For some reason I find a lot of these kinds of performances highly effective.
Here is “Song for Snow” by Florence Price, that wonderful Black American composer whose work has been undergoing a massive rediscovery over the last few years.
This next work, Stella Natalis by Sir Karl Jenkins, is new to me. (The entire work is in a playlist as opposed to a single video, so hopefully this embeds correctly.) I found this information on this work:
Karl Jenkins, the classically trained master of global ‘crossover,’ has composed a new work for choir and orchestra, Stella Natalis, as a gift to music lovers of all stylistic and spiritual backgrounds for the 2009 holiday season. Its coupling, Joy to the world, features arrangements by Jenkins of carols from around the globe in keeping with the composer’s inclusive and universal approach to the message of music.
Enjoy! It’s pretty cool.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas
It’s always interesting to see what loves we carry forward that our parents gave us, and which we don’t share with them. My mother loved musicals; she grew up with the great musicals of 1950s and 1960s Hollywood (my father loved them too), and she passed that love on to me. So today we have three selections that come from musical films.
First, Bing Crosby. This is the version from the movie itself; I don’t think this is the recording that has gone on to become the greatest selling single of all time, but I could be wrong.
Now, this next one…I don’t have any idea of Mom ever saw Mame, or if she liked it if she did. Somehow it never came up. And this isn’t the film version of the song, either! I’m going with this one because, well, I like the stage version more than I do the film version. Here is Angela Lansbury.
And finally, we have this. I’ve made no secret over the years that I have very little room in my life or my heart for any version of this song beside this one, and I continue to be vexed by the lyric change that Frank Sinatra, as much as I love him, imposed on this song that has become the standard, even though for me that lyric change completely upends the meaning and emotion of the song. Enough of that, though: Mom loved Judy Garland, and that’s enough for today.
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas
It’s time for some Christmas humor! Funny takes on Christmas songs abound (though it’s interesting to note which songs lend themselves to humor more than others):
(I would have posted the official video, but Mr. Yankovic has disabled the video from playing on other sites. See it here.)
An annual favorite of mine:
The lost, original ending to It’s a Wonderful Life:
And finally, while I hate “Christmas Shoes” as much as everybody else, it did give Patton Oswalt an opportunity to do this. NOT safe for work! Be careful!
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Your Daily Dose of Christmas
“The snow turned into rain….”
Yup, I feature this every year, because I love it as a song and because thematically it really does capture something of a “dark side” to Christmas. There is always a sense of, “Is this the way my life should have gone? Have I ended up where I should have?” as we near the end of another year, and amidst the hustle and bustle of the Christmas season there are always the moments when I find myself thinking of roads not taken, paths not followed in a yellow wood (even if the passing there had worn them really about the same), and the people who loomed large in my life for a time but who are now gone, in one way or another.
It hits harder this year, for obvious reasons…and it’s looking very much like we won’t be having a white Christmas. The snow is, alas, turning into rain.
Here is Dan Fogelberg and “Same Old Lang Syne”.