Welcome to the Christmas Spectacular! This annual program brings together classical and popular music for the season. Maestro DeMain, the Madison Symphony Orchestra, and the Madison Symphony Chorus welcome a number of guest artists, including three Madison-based singers, soprano Jamie-Rose Guarrine, mezzo-soprano Letrice Stanley, and tenor James Doing. The Madison Youth Choirs join us once again this year to add a youthful sound to this program. Last year, Madison's own Mt. Zion Gospel Choir made their debut at these concerts, and we are delighted to welcome them back once again for a Gospel finale.

The Magnificat, one of the Biblical canticles (Luke 1: 46-55), is in the voice of Mary: a heartfelt response to the Annunciation that she herself had conceived a child by the Holy Spirit. The text was chanted during the Vespers service in the Catholic liturgy, but it was also taken up enthusiastically by Martin Luther during the Reformation. In the Baroque era, composers broke the canticle into small sections, stressing the emotional content of individual passages or words, or exploiting the illustrative qualities of the text. (For example, the words omnes generationes are nearly always marked by a sudden appearance of the full chorus.) This Baroque tradition of Magnificat -writing culminated in J. S. Bach's great D Major Magnificat, a product of his extraordinarily fertile early years in as Kantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Bach's Lutheran congregation used the Latin Magnificat during the most important feasts of the church year: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. Bach's setting of the Magnificat was composed during his first year in Leipzig, for the Christmas service of 1723. This original version was set in E-flat Major, but at some point before 1730, Bach revised the work, recasting it in D major, and reworking the orchestration. In this work, Bach at once adapts and surpasses the conventions of the Baroque Magnificat. All of the musical cliches are here: the descending melody on deposuit and the corresponding rise on exultavit during the tenor's aria, the sudden choral entry on omnes generationes, and many others. However, Bach's use of these conventional devices achieves a natural, simple grace, that is never forced. Bach only set the Magnificat text one time, but what a setting it is!

By the time Gioacchino Rossini wrote his Messa di Gloria he was among Italy's most successful opera composers, and he had settled in Naples, one of the great centers of Italian opera. This Messa, which includes only the Kyrie and Gloria sections of the Latin Mass, was performed for the first time at the church of San Ferdinando in Naples on March 20, 1820. Though this was not his first sacred work--he had written several Latin works while still a student in Bologna--this was the first sacred work he wrote after achieving tremendous success. Not surprisingly, Rossini adapted the forms and vocal style of opera in several of its sections. The soprano solo Laudamus te (part of the Gloria) is perhaps the most operatic moment of all. In fact, Rossini--always a active self-borrower--cribbed the brief orchestral introduction from music he had already used in two earlier operas! True to operatic form, the Laudamus te begins with a long cantabile section which culminates in a solo cadenza. Then the tempo quickens and the soloist gets a flashy solo display.
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We continue with two works that feature the Madison Youth Choirs. The music of Englishman John Rutter has appeared on nearly all of our Holiday concerts in recent years, and this program is no exception. Here, children's voices sing his Angel's Carol, a joyous song with a refrain of Gloria in excelsis Deo. Mr. Doing joins the kids for an arrangement of the familiar Good King Wenceslas. This hymn for St. Stephen's Day (December 26) pays tribute to a legendary 10th-century Bohemian ruler and saint. It was penned in about 1850 by the poet John Mason Neale. The original tune, a 13th-century spring carol, had nothing to do with Christmas, but is now inseparable from this cheerful hymn.

Daniel Pinkham lives today in Boston. According to Pinkham, he decided to become a composer at age six, when he tried to sell pieces copied from his lesson books to his parents. When they told him that he couldn't simply copy someone else's music for sale, he decided to write his own! He served as Music Director at King's Chapel in Boston, for well over 40 years. Pinkham has taught at Simmons College, Boston University, Harvard University, and at the New England Conservatory, where he is still on faculty. Pinkham's 1957 Christmas Cantata is one of his most often-performed works. This piece is scored for three choirs: mixed voices and two brass ensembles. (The second choir may be replaced by organ.) The scoring pays tribute to the "polychoral" style of the High Renaissance, with echo effects and changes of texture used to highlight the text. In this three-movement work, Pinkham sets a series of texts from the Latin liturgy. The first movement, Quem vidistis, pastores?, sets a brief dramatic dialogue that was used to preface the Christmas Mass from the early Middle Ages onwards. It begins in a mood of quiet mystery, but the tempo quickens and the style brightens at the shepherds' reply (Natum vidimus), leading to a series of joyous concluding Alleluias. The second section, O magnum mysterium, is a text sung during the early morning Matins service on Christmas Day. It opens quietly with women's voices in unison. The full chorus enters gradually, and the movement reaches a peak with the invocation Dominum Christum. In the final section, Pinkham uses the familiar opening of the Gloria text as a dancelike refrain between verses of Psalm 99 (100 in the English Bible). These verses become gradually fuller, until the finale, a grand Alleluia.

In 1717 George Friderick Handel moved to England to compose and produce opera. For nearly two decades, Handel was the most successful impresario in England, but by the 1730s, Handel’s Italian opera had gone out of fashion, and he turned increasingly to the English oratorio. His oratorios--dramatic renderings of Biblical stories familiar to his English audiences--were enormously successful, and their popularity endured and grew long after Handel’s death. Messiah of 1741 is, of course, Handel’s most enduring "hit," but it is somewhat unusual among his oratorios in that his text is a pastiche of direct quotes from the St. James version of the Bible. The finale to our first half is the concluding Hallelujah chorus from Part II. And if you feel like following the lead of King George III and standing for this great choral acclamation, go right ahead!

After intermission, we turn to the popular side of Christmas, beginning with an upbeat medley of several American favorites--Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, Silver Bells, Winter Wonderland, and White Christmas. In 1954, arranger Alfred Burt published a small collection of original Christmas songs titled Afred Burt Carols.  (Tragically, this talented, but little-recognized musician died that same year at age 34.)  This modest little publication contained several songs that have since become Holiday favorites: Caroling, Caroling, The Star Carol, and Some Children See Him.  Most of these songs were composed specifically for children, and sent out as gifts with the family's Christmas cards.  His Some Children See Him, composed to a text by Wihla Hutson, is presented here in a particularly effective arrangement for soprano and children's voices.

Composer Noel Regney and his wife, lyricist Gloria Shayne wrote the Holiday standard Do You Hear What I Hear? in 1962 and it became a huge hit for Bing Crosby in 1963, selling over a million copies. Though usually heard as a sentimental song to the Baby Jesus, Regney later said "I am amazed that people can think they know the song, and not know it is a prayer for peace." It was written in October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when nuclear war seemed imminent. Contrary to their usual practice, Regney wrote the lyric, and his wife wrote the melody. The result was a song that they found so moving that they couldn't bear to sing it at first. The final stanza, with its "Pray for peace, people everywhere!" makes this as appropriate in 2006 as it was in 1962.

The oldest music heard here, the anonymous Wexford Carol is thought to have originated in 12th-century Ireland. Derek Holman's orchestration is witty and colorful, backing the traditional words sung by Mr. Doing and children's voices. The successful songwriting team of Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane wrote the melancholy Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas for the successful 1944 MGM musical Meet Me in St. Louis, where it was introduced by Judy Garland. This highly sentimental movie, about the idealized Smith family from turn-of-the-century St. Louis, was the perfect bit of escapism for wartime America. The original lyrics for their Christmas song, however, went beyond mere melancholy: "Have yourself a merry little Christmas--it may be your last. Next year we may all be living in the past." Garland vetoed the original version as too dark, and Blane substituted the now-familiar lyrics she sang in the movie.

We wrap up with a set of Gospel songs by the Mt. Zion Gospel Choir, led by Leotha Stanley, with his daughter Letrice. All of these pieces have been adapted for this concert by Leotha Stanley, beginning with his original song, Jesus is the Reason for the Season. Though he was a highly successful stage composer in his day, Adolphe Adam is known to American audiences almost exclusively for his Christmas carol Cantique de Noël. Written in 1847 as a setting of a Christmas poem by Mary Cappeaux, it was later adapted by J. S. Wright as English carol, O Holy Night. At these concerts we hear Mr. Stanley's Gospel version. The spiritual Go Tell it on the Mountain seems to have had its origins in the early 1800s. It was popularized by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, a remarkable choir from Nashville's Fisk University whose tours after the Civil War brought African American music to a worldwide audience. The most familiar version of this spiritual was published in 1907 by a Fisk professor and longtime director of the Jubilee Singers, John Wesley Work, Jr.  Judith Christie-McAllister is one of Contemporary Gospel's leading singers, composers, and producers. Her Sing Praise to Thee comes from her 2001 CD Send Judah First.

And then it's your turn to sing!
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program notes ©2006 by J. Michael Allsen