Welcome to our annual Christmas Spectacular! As always, we serve up a musical Holiday feast whose courses range from Classical style to Pop. On the "Classical" side, the Madison Symphony Chorus presents works by Bach, Nelson, and Mendelssohn. Children’s voices have long been a feature of these concerts, and you’ll hear the Madison Youth Choirs on several selections. For the third year in a row, we welcome the Mt. Zion Gospel Choir to round off our program. The featured vocal soloist is trucker-turned-opera singer Carl Tanner, who sings selections from his popular Christmas CD.

Among the most famous hymns of Christmas, Joy to the World may also the most famous case of misattribution among Christmas hymns. It has traditionally been credited to Handel, and indeed one of its first publishers, the hymn writer William Holford printed it with Handel's name in the early 1830s, probably because of its close resemblance to a few bits from the ever-familiar Messiah: the choruses Lift Up Your Heads and Glory to God, and the instrumental sections of the aria Comfort Ye.  Hymn tunes were generally given shorthand titles, and Holford in fact titled the tune Comfort. The great Methodist hymn writer Lowell Mason cemented the association with Handel when he revised the tune in 1839 (retitling it Antioch) and used it to set a Christmas hymn text by Handel's contemporary Isaac Watts. This familiar hymn is heard here in an arrangement by Austrian composer Christian Kolonovitz--a joyously brassy rendition for baritone and chorus.

The Mass in B minor, Johann Sebastian Bach's most monumental sacred work, was completed in the last year of his life, but it is actually an immense patchwork of movements assembled over the course of some thirty years. The choruses heard on this program date from the 1730s, when Bach was becoming dissatisfied with the limited resources available to him as Kantor of the Thomaskirche. He made several attempts during this period to better his situation. In 1733, he sent a "Missa," a setting of the Kyrie and Gloria of the mass, to the opulent Dresden court of the Elector of Saxony. Bach hoped that this sample of his work, which he referred to as a "trifling product of that science which I have attained in Musique," would lead to a position in Dresden. In the end, only a more rather modest request was granted: that the Elector name him court composer, a position of little more than honorary significance. The chorus Gloria in excelsis Deo is joyous, with complex vocal lines intertwining with a trumpet ritornello. At Et in terra pax hominibus, the mood becomes more pensive, with a pair of musical ideas combined in ever more complicated counterpoint. Cum Sancto Spiritu, the Gloria's closing chorus, returns to the joyful style of the opening, and brings the movement to a close with a magnificent double fugue.

Though he was respected in his day as composer of operas and ballet scores (including the well-known Giselle) Adolphe Adam is known to American audiences almost exclusively for his Christmas carol Cantique de Noël. Written in 1847 as a setting of a two-verse Christmas poem by Mary Cappeaux, this carol was later adapted by J. S. Wright as a three-verse English carol, O Holy Night. Tonight's performance features an arrangement for orchestra and solo baritone by William Ryden.

The text of Ring Out, Wild Bells, is a section of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem Memoriam, published in 1850. This New Year’s poem became a well-known 19th-century song with a melody (erroneously) attributed to Mozart. The new setting heard here is by American composer Ron Nelson. Nelson was born in Joliet, IL, and received his musical training at the Eastman School and in Paris. He served on the faculty of Brown University, for some 37 years, until his retirement in 1993. His Ring Out, Wild Bells, written in 1987, uses an abbreviated version of Tennyson’s poem, and a richly percussive (tintinnabular!) accompaniment.

He is acclaimed as a conductor and composer of concert music, but John Williams is most famous as a composer of over 80 film scores. One of these scores was for Home Alone, the hit of the holiday season in 1990. This film, pitting young Kevin (Macauley Culkin) against a pair of bumbling burglars was a blend of sentimentality and slapstick nastiness. Star of Bethlehem is one of the sweeter moments in the movie, sung here, as Williams scored it, by children’s voices.

Franz Schubert composed his song Wiegenlied ("Lullaby") in 1816. The song, which remained unpublished until after his death may have been composed as a sentimental response to the death of his own younger brother Theodor in infancy. Its anonymous German text is a gentle lullaby that speaks of angel voices. The Italian text, Mille cherubini in coro ("A choir of a thousand cherubs") and the choral refrains were added even later in the 19th century. This version with its sweet imagery and sweeter voices has become a Christmas standard.

Though he is well-known today for his grand Symphony in D minor, César Franck spent much of his career working as a church musician. Representing this side of Franck's life, we have his beloved Panis Angelicus, composed in 1877 when he was organist at the Parisian church of Ste. Clothilde. This setting of a Latin communion hymn shows his gift for presenting a straightforward and lyrical melody above skillful and complex counterpoint.

Felix Mendelssohn considered the oratorio Elijah to be one of his crowning achievements: a huge sacred work that was in many ways his tribute to Handel. Like Handel’s enduring Messiah, Elijah is a series of quotations from the Bible--in this case passages from Luther’s German version assembled by a Lutheran pastor named Julius Schubring, and translated into English by William Bartholomew. The premiere, at the Birmingham festival in August 1846, was an astounding success. One reviewer wrote: "The last note of Elijah was drowned in a long-continued, unanimous volley of plaudits, vociferous and deafening … never was there a more complete triumph--never a more thorough and speedy recognition of a great work of art." And at the close the first half of this program, you’ll hear that "last note"--the magnificent final fugue, Lord, our Creator.

America's premiere "Pops" composer Leroy Anderson created dozens of works that have become staples of the orchestra and band repertoire: A Trumpeter's Lullaby, The Typewriter, The Syncopated Clock, and the holiday standard A Christmas Festival, to name just a few. His greatest success was in the late 1940s and 1950s, when he worked as the staff arranger for that granddaddy of all Pops orchestras, Arthur Fiedler's Boston Pops. Many of his most popular works were created for Fiedler, including Sleigh Ride (1948).  Though the idea for the for the piece reportedly struck him as he was working outside on a hot July day, Sleigh Ride is the perfect picture of an old-fashioned winter journey. In a later interview, Anderson said: "The point of a number like Sleigh Ride, that you can call a descriptive piece, or pictorial, is that you have to start with the idea of the rhythm, and whatever it is first. And in this case, it’s the rhythm of the sleigh bells, and these sleigh bells go chink-chink-chink…" The journey ends with a horse whinny from the trumpet.

Another sleigh ride, and the most familiar of all Christmas songs, Jingle Bells, was written in the 1850s by James Pierpont: a Unitarian minister, organist, photographer, and sometime songwriter who worked in Massachusetts California, Georgia, and Florida. Jingle Bells, published in 1857, was not intended as a "Christmas song" at all, but rather a "sleighing song"--a popular genre at the time. It was not really popular until the later 19th century, when it gained its exclusive association with the Holiday season. The lively arrangement heard here is by the eminent English choral director and arranger David Willcocks.

Most of our notions about Santa and his standard operating procedures--reindeer, rooftops, and chimneys--come straight from Clement Clark Moore’s classic 1823 poem A Visit From St. Nicholas, better known today as ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas. There were many musical settings, but the best-known was written by Ken Darby, a successful film and choral composer throughout the 1940s and 1950s. Darby’s version became a huge hit for Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians in 1942, in the colorful arrangement heard here, created by Waring’s arranger Harry Simeone.

Christmastime is Here was written for Mr. Tanner by Katherine Chrishon, music director at St. John the Evangelist Parish in Warrenton, VA. It is a calm, lyrical, and heartfelt tribute to the season.

Canadian composer Stephen Hatfield created the version of the traditional English Apple-Tree Wassail heard here. We tend to associate wassailing with Christmas, but its origins predate the introduction of Christianity to England. According to the composer: "Wassail comes from the Anglo-Saxon wes hael--to be healthy. Originally, wassails were taken seriously as blessings on farms and farmers that would help ensure the health of the coming year. The Apple-Tree Wassail comes from the cider country of Devon and Somerset, where it might be sung in the orchards or at the farmer's door. The references to ‘lily white pins’ and ‘lily white smocks’ are meant to flatter the farmer's family by listing the fine clothes and ornaments they could supposedly afford to wear. The twelfth day of Christmas (Ephiphany) was thought to be a perfect time to bless the orchards, in part because it was believed that evil spirits did their best to confound Christmas piety in the twelve days following Christ's birth."

We close with a series of rousing Gospel selections by the Mt. Zion Gospel Choir…and then it’s your turn to sing!
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program notes ©2007 by J. Michael Allsen