Madison Symphony Orchestra
Program Notes
December 13-14-15, 2019
94th Season / Subscription Concert No.4
Michael Allsen
Welcome to
the 2019 “Madison
Symphony Christmas.” This program has become a Madison holiday
tradition, and is
always among our most popular offerings. The program moves
from classical
styles in the first half—culminating in Handel’s great
“Hallelujah” chorus—to
lighter holiday music in the second half. And as always, we
end with a rockin’
Gospel finale… and a chance for you
to sing along! This program features three great
choral groups from
Madison, the Madison Youth Choirs, the Mount Zion Gospel Choir,
and our own
Madison Symphony Chorus. We are also proud to feature one of the
MSO’s own, harpist Johanna
Wienholts.
John Rutter is celebrated as both a choral
conductor and as a
composer of sacred music. His Cambridge Singers have received
critical acclaim
in a series of performances and recordings of repertoire
ranging from the
Renaissance to Rutter’s own works. As a composer and arranger,
and he has
produced children’s operas, orchestral works, and a multitude
of choral works,
from small anthems to settings of the Gloria,
Magnificat, and Requiem. Rutter has explained that Christmas
music has “…always
occupied a special place in my affections, ever since I sang
in my first
Christmas Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols as a nervous
ten-year-old boy
soprano. For me, and I suspect for most of the other members
of the Highgate
Junior School Choir, it was the high point of our singing
year, diligently
rehearsed and eagerly anticipated for weeks beforehand. Later,
my voice changed
and I turned from singing to composition, but I never forgot
those early
Highgate carol services...” We have heard many of Rutter’s
Christmas works over
the past several seasons, and on this program, he is
represented by his solemn
version of O Come O Come Emmanuel. Its text, first
published in Germany in
1710, is a paraphrase of some of the most ancient surviving
Christmas
chants—the 8th-century “O antiphons.” These chants were
traditionally sung on
the seven days leading up to Christmas. Rutter’s effective
arrangement begins
with the simple unadorned chant tune, gradually expanding
while maintaining a
sense of profound mystery.
The Latin Magnificat,
one of the Biblical canticles (Luke 1: 46-55), is in the voice
of Mary: a
heartfelt response to the Annunciation that she 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—“all generations”—are
nearly always marked by a sudden appearance of the full
chorus.) This Baroque
tradition of Magnificat-writing
culminated
in the great D Major Magnificat by Johann Sebastian Bach, 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 between
1728 and 1730 or
somewhat earlier, Bach revised the work, recasting it in D
Major, making some
compositional changes. He also reworked the orchestration,
substituting flutes
for recorders and changing the scoring of some movements. In
this work, Bach at
once adapts and surpasses the conventions of the Baroque Magnificat—Bach only set the Magnificat
text one time, but what a setting it is! We present four
excerpts,
beginning with the opening Magnificat.
The Latin text is presented by the chorus in a joyfully
decorated setting
accompanied by a festive trio of trumpets. Bach paints the
word Omnes generationes
with a brief but
intense fugal chorus that comes to a dramatic pause near the
end. Deposuit is
set as a forceful aria for
the tenor soloist with a brilliant violin obbligato. The grand
closing chorus, Gloria
Patri, begins with a solemn
threefold acclamation, and concludes with music adapted from
the opening
chorus.
Concertos for the harp were
relatively rare in the Baroque, and the only example composed
by George Friderick
Handel was originally
part of his choral ode Alexander’s
Feast,
performed in London on February 19, 1736. Within Alexander’s Feast, the concerto actually played
a dramatic role: it
followed a recitative describing how, during an entertainment
for Alexander the
Great, the Greek poet Timotheus, “plac’d on high amid the
tuneful quire
[choir], with flying fingers touched the lyre [harp].” The
concerto was
originally designed for either harp or archlute (a lute with
an extended neck
and additional bass strings), but in 1738, Handel published it
as an organ
concerto, as part of his six Op.4 organ concertos. The
relatively light
background, with muted strings and a pizzicato bassline still
displays its
original intent is a harp concerto however. Aside from
widely-separated
ensemble ritornelli,
the opening
movement (Andante
allegro) is carried
almost entirely by the solo harp.
The next two
pieces feature
our vocal soloists.
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 later
in the 19th
century. This version with its sweet imagery and sweeter
voices has become a
Christmas standard. The traditional Basque carol Gabriel’s
Message is
based upon a much earlier Latin chant.
The avid folksong collector, novelist, and Anglican
priest Sabine
Baring-Gould published the English translation heard here in the
early 20th
century. This carol
is a gentle
retelling of the Annunciation story, and the quiet and effective arrangement heard here inserts
part of the
Latin Magnificat
text before the last
stanza.
The voices of
young girls
are then the perfect complement to a second work by John Rutter. His Star Carol is
an alternately playful
and solemn song on the birth of Jesus. When the
Romantic composer Charles
Gounod set
a lovely cantabile
melody above a
keyboard prelude by J.
S. Bach, he
created what would become one of the best-loved sacred songs
of all time. Gounod
initially improvised this melody over Bach’s Prelude No.1 from The
Well-Tempered Clavier in 1853, and it was initially
published as an
instrumental solo. In 1859 it appeared as a vocal solo with
its now-familiar
Latin text. The Ave Maria, drawn from the Annunciation
story in the Gospel of
Luke, is one of the most familiar prayers of the Catholic
Church.
Felix Mendelssohn composed
his Lobgesang
(“Song of Praise”) in 1840, when he was asked to provide a work
for a festival
in Leipzig marking the 400th anniversary of Johannes Gutenberg’s
invention of
the printing press. He had originally planned to do a
small-scale cantata, but
soon found the work growing to enormous dimensions, with three
purely
instrumental movements and a large choral finale that, together,
combine to
form a work that is over an hour in length. (It is usually
listed today as his Symphony
No.2, but Mendelssohn himself
thought of it as “symphony-cantata.”) Mendelssohn drew most of
the texts for
the final movement from Martin Luther’s translation of the
Bible, and the
finale as a whole is a joyous statement of faith. We present
here the glorious
closing chorus, which begins with the triumphant “Alles
danket dem Herrn!” (“Let all creation thank the Lord!”). Mendelssohn
then
launches into a magnificent fugue worthy of J.S. Bach himself.
(The work
was in fact premiered at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Bach
had worked a
century earlier.). The final phrase is a grand statement of a
musical motto
that Mendelssohn uses to unify this enormous work.
We follow
this with music
by Adolphe Adam.
Though he was
respected in his day as composer of operas and ballet scores
(including a score
for the successful ballet Giselle),
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.
This performance
features a grand arrangement
for orchestra, chorus, and solo soprano by Dan Goeller.
And as always, the finale to our
first half is the
concluding “Hallelujah” chorus from Part II of Handel’s 1741 oratorio Messiah. While
this familiar and
exuberant chorus is actually the conclusion of the Easter
section of the
oratorio, it has long since become a standard part of the
Christmas season as
well. Feel free to sing along if the spirit moves you!
Our second
half begins with the
Christmas
Fantasy by Dan
Goeller. This
2008 work brings together four
traditional carols, opening with a brassy version of the Sussex Carol (On Christmas
Night All Christians Sing).
The
horns lead an equally forceful version of We
Three Kings. The
lullaby What Child is
This?—set to the
traditional 16th-century tune Greensleeves—is
cast here as a gentle oboe solo.
After a
brief interlude, the arrangement closes with an exuberant
version of Sing We Now of
Christmas, again led by
the horns.
The program continues with a
pair of features for the older voices of the Madison Youth
Choirs. 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 (Epiphany) 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.” The most
familiar of all holiday 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 in fact intended as a
“Christmas song” at
all, but rather a “sleighing song”—a popular genre at the
time. It was not
really well-known until the later 19th century, when it gained
its exclusive
association with the holiday season. The good-humored
arrangement heard here is
by the eminent English choral director and arranger David
Willcocks.
A Texas
native, Randol Alan
Bass lives and works today
in Dallas, and is renowned around the country as one of
America’s premier
“Pops” arrangers. His Christmas arrangements are particularly
popular, and this
program includes a movement from his 1988 medley Christmas
Ornaments, a
lushly-orchestrated fantasia on several familiar holiday
tunes. Christmas
Ornaments closes with The
Twelve Days of Christmas—a song that refers to
the traditional
celebration of Christmas, from December 25 through January 6
(“Twelfth Night”
or the Feast of the Epiphany). The song, with its uniquely
“cumulative” form,
existed by the 18th century, sung to various tunes. In 1909
Frederic Austin
published the familiar song we know today, introducing the
grand ritard on
“five gold rings.” Bass’s
version is lively, rhythmically dynamic, and thoroughly
witty.
The Madison Symphony Chorus and
our soloists then presents of medley of familiar Holiday
favorites, in
arrangements by Lee
Norris. Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It
Snow! was
written in 1945 by the songwriting team of Sammy Cahn
and Jule Styne. It became a No.1 hit the next December and
remains one of the
most popular and often-covered Holiday standards. 1945 was
also when singer Mel
Tormé wrote beloved Christmas Song
(Chestnuts Roasting on an
Open Fire) with his collaborator Robert Wells. Tormé
quickly showed the song to his friend Nat Cole, whose 1946
hit recording is now
a beloved holiday classic. Jingle Bell Rock comes
from 1957,
when it was written by amateur songwriters Joseph Beal and
James Boothe. It was
a huge hit that year for singer Bobby Helms, whose Rockabilly
version of the
song remains the most familiar recording, despite well over
100 later covers by
other singers. Bing Crosby had a huge hit in 1943 with the
sentimental holiday
song, I’ll Be Home for Christmas. This song by
the team of Kim Gannon
and Walter Kent, struck a deeply emotional chord for the
millions of Americans
serving overseas in wartime and their families back home.
Of course, no Madison
Symphony Christmas program would be complete without the Mount
Zion Gospel
Choir! As always, they are singing arrangements for choir and
orchestra by
codirector Leotha
Stanley. Their set
begins with a Stanley original, The Joy of Christmas,
which was
introduced at our holiday concert in 2016. We also reprise
Stanley’s version of
Silent
Night. This most popular of all Christmas hymns
was written in 1818 by
the organist Franz Gruber and Rev. Josef Mohr for a Christmas
Eve service at
the tiny church they served in village of Oberndorf, Austria. The set concludes with a
newly-composed song by
Stanley, Christmas Hope, premiered here by the
combined choirs and
orchestra.
And then,
friends, it’s your
turn to sing!
________
program notes
©2019 by J.
Michael Allsen