Your Daily Dose of CHRISTMAS!!!

I feature this work most years, and there’s a reason for that: it’s good! And if you’ve never heard it before, here’s a treat: a good and proper short British symphony, loaded with familiar Christmas tunes and old-fashioned proper Britishness, or British properness. Something like that. It’s the “Carol Symphony” by Victory Hely-Hutchinson.

There, that’s fun, isn’t it! However….

It turns out that Hely-Hutchinson’s is not the only Carol Symphony out there! Composer Patric Standford (1939-2014) also wrote one, and listening to both back-to-back is a nice exercise in contrast. Neither of these works is a towering contribution to symphonic literature, but they are both lovely longer-form contributions to Christmas music, and that’s terrific!