Christmas Carols
Leah wrote a couple days ago about downloading a ton of Christmas music from iTunes, and it got me thinking that I haven’t yet played my favorite Christmas music. It’s a compilation of old English carols transcribed for men’s choir by, for the most part, Gustav Holst (composer of The Planets). I usually play it while we’re decorating the tree, trying my wife’s patience and making her anxious that it’s too arcane and weird for our son’s taste, causing him to split. So, this year, I didn’t play it, and we listened instead to what KEXP was playing Christmas Eve. This music ran a pretty wide gamut, much of it involving Santa Clauses that were either drunk, misbehaving or both.
There was one set, however, that really grabbed me. It was a treatment of the Nutcracker Suite by Duke Ellington, and it was one of the most musically complex things I’ve heard in a while. It’s part of an album called Three Suites, from about 1960. I was impressed enough that I ordered it from Amazon as soon as it was over.
I’ll get to the Holst sometime before the tree comes down. I’ve been known to listen to it in August.
