With December now here, and the church calendar season of Advent under way, it's a good time to look into a couple of new Christmas recordings which I've acquired since this time last year or the year before, whenever I last posted some new Christmas material.
What I love about the traditional music of Christmas is that it's absolutely music of the people. Genuine folk music, in the most literal sense of the term. And why not? At one level, the Christmas story is a story of people of the most ordinary kind, caught up in a most extraordinary event. I think that Christians through the centuries have often responded to the very ordinariness of Joseph and Mary, of the Shepherds and the Wise Men, the Innkeeper, and even the animals. The story comes very close to the heart of how so many, many people in the Christian world lived before the coming of the industrial age.
Those of you who follow this blog regularly will recall that I have before presented some works of music based on the traditional noëls or folk carols of France. Like similar carols everywhere, these songs live in a world of simple diatonic harmonies and engaging melodies. The words are usually strophic, the tunes more or less appropriate to the scenes and events and feelings being evoked.
Today, I want to bring to you two well-filled CDs (or downloads) from Naxos containing a veritable treasure chest of Christmas music, much of it inspired by the noëls, and all of it composed by the French royal composer Marc-Antoine Charpentier.
I've previously brought to your attention Charpentier's utterly charming Messe de minuit pour Noël, in which the original tunes are used to set the text of the Ordinary of the Mass. In the recordings I'm featuring today, we get the original words as well as the melodies.
While the melodies may not be familiar to you, there's no doubt that they are tunes of the people, totally and aptly suited to mass song among people who are not formally trained musicians. Charpentier's arrangements of these traditional tunes include accompaniments of bewitching beauty, and the music is aptly orchestrated and performed with original instruments, such as would have been used in the reign of Louis XIV at Versailles.
Aside from the popularity of these well-known carols in France, Charpentier must have possessed some particular affection himself for the Christmas season -- at least if one can judge by the skill and care which he lavished on these seasonal pieces. Not least in his bag of tricks is the skill of making the music sound artless and simple when it is actually becoming quite sophisticated. Perhaps the best example of that is the organ arrangements of noëls which dot the two records, arrangements which achieve a very different effect altogether from Louis-Claude Daquin's noëls for the organ which I have also previously reviewed.
For this delightful two-disc set of Christmas music, we are indebted to Kevin Mallon and the Aradia Ensemble. These are but a few of the many treasures this team of Canadian musicians have recorded through the years for Naxos Records, but they are certainly not the least! Just as with Daquin's organ delights, once you have listened to these a few times they will become as much a necessary part of your Christmas season as any of the tunes from the English-language tradition. These recordings are easily available as downloads.
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