The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Since I’m doing all this James Bond content of late, here’s a Christmas song from the James Bond Christmas movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service! (Yes, it’s a Christmas movie, but yes, that ending…sob….anyway….) This song is heard in the movie in the background when Bond is evading bad guys in a Swiss village at Christmastime. And yes, I rather like the song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZewG-NUJ7M
It’s December 1! If you’re new to my blogging game, this is something I’ve been doing every December for…a while, anyway. I did it every year at Byzantium’s Shores, and I’m doing it here. Every day from December 1 to Christmas Day, I’ll post a bit of Christmas-related content. It’s usually music, but there might be something else along the way. (I often have no idea what I’m posting each day until I post it, but this year for several reasons that will become clear I have to actually pre-schedule a lot of these.)
Anyway, welcome to December! Joy to the World!
The Polar Express is rather a polarizing movie, mostly because of the style of animation Robert Zemeckis used in making it. The landscapes and a whole lot of the film’s compositions are frankly gorgeous, and the story is (for me, anyway) fun, fleshing out what is a classic picture book in which not a whole lot happens. (This is not a criticism of the book, by the way! It’s a picture book that’s about 30 pages long, and the main attraction there is the amazing art.)
What turns people off Polar Express seems to be one big factor, but it’s not one you can really escape if it does bother you: the characters’ eyes, which in this style of digital-capture animation tend to look…glassy, lifeless, dead. The eyes look unblinking and like what you’d see in a doll. This never impedes my enjoyment of the movie, but I can’t argue with people who react strongly against the movie on that basis, either.
And all of that has nothing to do with the music, which is wonderful and amazing. This is one of the best scores Alan Silvestri has written, and for me it’s absolutely a Christmas classic. Silvestri blends engaging action music with quotes of traditional material and his own gorgeously sweeping melody that’s all about the magic of this time of year.
It’s almost here! Can you still hear the ringing of that bell?
Here’s an album I grew up with…or maybe it wasn’t quite this album, but it was certainly this guy singing. I most definitely remember this version of “We Three Kings”, but I don’t know if this is actually the original record or if this selection is a repackaging. Anyway, it’s the Christmas stylings of American tenor Mario Lanza.
This music is really a throwback to a style of operatic singing that isn’t much in vogue anymore. Born Alfredo Arnold Cocozza, and taking the name “Mario Lanza” as a stage name later on, Lanza started out as a classical tenor before his big voice and good looks carried him straight to Hollywood, where stardom beckoned. After World War II he ended up with MGM, where he made several films before various difficulties led to him being dismissed from MGM, spending a year as a recluse, returning to film but with less success, and finally to planning a return to the opera stage in 1959. By this time Lanza had a number of health problems owing to his weight and probably alcoholism, and he died in 1959 of an aneurysm.
His personal life seems to have been a mess, and his family didn’t really life happily ever after, either. His wife died of a drug overdose just months after he did; his son died of a heart attack when he was just 37 (younger than Lanza himself had been at his death), his daughter was killed when she was hit by a car while crossing a street, and his other son died in 2008 at just 55 years of age.
Setting aside the sadness of Mario Lanza’s life, his voice is something to hear. No, he’s not Pavarotti or Domingo, but he had a big and golden-sounding voice, and listening to this record now, I’m struck by his command of phrasing and his superb diction. He’s not just a big-voice, big-chested tenor belting out high C’s from the sky, and like many things I remember from my youth, I appreciate this sound a lot more now than I did then.
Here’s Mario Lanza.
Do you have any musical items on your lifelong wish list? Something you’d be sad if you reached the end of your days and never got to hear? I do! I’d love to attend a performance of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, the full ballet, with full-on Russian choreography and a live orchestra (sometimes, in smaller venues, ballet companies perform to recorded music). Here is the Bolshoi in 2011, performing a wonderfully arresting version of the great ballet. This is some amazing stuff!
And if you don’t have time for the entire thing (make time!), you can always enjoy the condensed Suite that Tchaikovsky put together. I’ve written before of what this suite means to me on a personal level, as one of my fondest musical memories.
I had a music teacher in third and fourth grade, when I was going to an elementary school in Hillsboro, OR, who at one point taught us a song from an opera based on the old fairy tale of “Hansel and Gretel”, called, appropriately enough, Hansel und Gretel. The song is a cheery thing near the beginning of the story when Gretel is teaching Hansel a dance. I remember the teacher, Mrs. Sturdevant (I think that was her name), telling us about the opera that had been written a hundred years or so before, by a composer named “Englebert Humperdinck”. I hate to admit that this particular name had a predictable effect on a room full of nine-year-old children, and I seem to recall Mrs. Sturdevant being a bit irritated that we giggled.
Sorry, Mrs. Sturdevant.
Anyway, I actually bought a recording of Humperdinck’s opera many years ago. It was a pretty nifty CD box that in addition to the 3 CDs and the booklet containing notes and the libretto, also had a little jigsaw puzzle depicting a scene from the opera. There was a period when sometimes CD box sets would come with little things like that, especially if they were recordings of music that might appeal to young listeners. Humperdinck’s Hansel und Gretel is often considered a children’s opera, because it is not terribly long, it’s full of folk tunes and dances, and its story is loaded with magic and wonder and an evil witch who wants to back the kids in her oven. Hansel und Gretel has become something of a Christmastime staple, even though it doesn’t exactly have anything specifically to do with Christmas. I haven’t heard it more than once or twice and those many years ago, so I addressed that this weekend.
Hansel und Gretel is like Wagner-lite: the orchestration and the drama are pure Wagner (Humperdinck himself was a committed Wagnerian), as is a lot of the imagery in the show. But because the story is lighter and free of Wagner’s heavier tendencies, the opera is a pretty good bridge between the Wagner-parody of Carl Stalling’s work on the Loony Tunes shorts and, well, actual Wagner. As for the opera’s Christmas associations, there’s the story of two children who get into trouble, and the magic of a life-size gingerbread house; also, the opera was premiered very near Christmas in 1893. When you think about it, a lot of our Christmas trappings don’t really have anything to do with Christmas specifically. The Sound of Music song “My Favorite Things” is a good example.
Having freshly heard Hansel und Gretel, I certainly plan to make it a part of my annual listening from now on. The performance I’m featuring here is especially nifty, because it’s actually a film made out of the opera, with Sir Georg Solti conducting (and this type of repertoire was Solti’s wheelhouse, so it’s a treat on that score as well). Live action is combined with animation to create the requisite sense of magic, and the performances are thrilling throughout. This film was intended for television, and aired on PBS’s Great Performances in 1981–not long after Mrs. Sturdevant was dealing with a bunch of kids laughing at the name “Engelbert Humperdinck”.
If you have a spare hour and forty-five minutes, give this a listen! It really is something of a delight. And look at the screen once in a while, because there’s actually usually something neat going on.
And now we’re into the last seven days before Christmas. As tends to be my practice, the selections will get longer as we get close to Christmas, because we could all use more music!
This is an entire album by Chanticleer, a magnificent all-male vocal ensemble based in San Francisco. Originally founded to perform Renaissance music according to historical performance practice, the group has branched out over the years to recording other genres. But their main “bread and butter” remains their Renaissance work, and I always love listening to them. It gives me the feeling of walking through stone cathedrals on cold days and nights, illuminated by either sun streaming through stained glass windows or by candles in sconces casting too little light to keep the vaulted ceiling above me from vanishing into the shadows. It’s the music of spice and incense and torchlight, of colorful robes and fine doublets and, yes, a dagger tucked into one’s belt or boot.
The final track of this album, by the way, is not a Renaissance piece at all, but a composition by Franz Biebl, a twentieth century German composer who only died in 2001. While Franz Schubert’s setting of the Ave Maria is undoubtedly the most famous, for me Biebl’s is the more beautiful. I won’t claim it’s the most beautiful, since there are many settings I haven’t even heard, but the one here is truly magical. I’ve known it ever since the Wartburg College Choir sang it as part of our annual Christmas program, back in the day.
Here is Chanticleer, performing their entire album. A Chanticleer Christmas. The days are truly growing short now, so find what light you may!
