Holly! Ivy! Angels! - Winter 2023
Holly, Ivy, Angels, Love – and Folk Like Us!
A (slightly) warmer – and dryer – patch of weather hadthe effect of tempting a motley crowd of Audlemites and assorted blow-ins from further afield to boldly venture out to St James on Friday 8 December to the Audlem Voices Winter Concert. And what a treat awaited them!
Early birds were treated to the sound of music from the corner by the Lady Chapel as the members of Folk Like Us, our guest performers, warmed up with White Christmas behind the pillars and got accustomed to the St James acoustic.
Jon Richardson, Chair of Audlem Voices, welcomed everyone and explained the ever-so-complicated logistics designed to allow five instrumentalists to evict ten choristers and take over their space for their part of the programme and then put everybody back again. (The audience were rapt, you could tell...) He then introduced Jenny Collis-Smith, our Musical Director and founder, and Naomi Newman, our accompanist, and we were off!
Hark the Herald Angels Sing, with full audience participation, carried peace on earth and mercy mild up to the rafters at full volume, and you could honestly say we were all singing from the same hymn sheet. The Bethlehem Carol sheet, to be precise!
Carol of the Huron Indians, in contrast, is a very gentle melodic carol with a rhythmic drum-like beat, written in the 1640s by a French Jesuit missionary who lived among the indigenous peoples around Lake Huron in Canada. He wrote this version of the nativity story in their language, Wendat, using imagery drawn from their culture. An English version by Jesse Edgar Middleton only appeared in 1926.
Our next piece, the richly baroque Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring by Johann Sebastian Bach, composed 100 years after the Huron Carol in the 1730s, is a solemn, yet deeply joyful, meditation on the mystery of God's love expressed through the person of Jesus, who draws us all to 'wisdom's holiest treasure' and leads us to eternal bliss.
We travelled back in time again to the 1400s for the mediaeval source of our next carol Adam lay ybounden. This cheerful meditation on the true meaning of the biblical account of the eating of a certain apple and its consequences. The music for it is modern, however, composed in 1957 by Boris Ord, then organist and choirmaster of King's College Cambridge. The choir love this short piece, and the audience looked like they enjoyed it too!
The gentlemen of the choir came forth at their soulful best with Amanda McBroom's beautiful song about the possibility of love The Rose (made famous by Bette Midler), in an arrangement for male voices by Alwyn Humphries. Why this song in a winter concert? Because the climax of the song is about the rose in the depths of winter...
The words of our very oldest piece of Christmas music Of the Father's Love Begotten came from the pen, or quill, of a Christian Roman poet, Aurelius Prudentius (what a great name!), some time in the 300s. By rights, we should sing it in Latin, but fortunately Anglican hymnwriter John Mason Neale made a lovely English translation in Victorian times, and this is what we sang to conclude the first part of our concert.
And then ... complicated logistics ... and our brilliant special guests Folk Like Us(Barbara Whitehead – flute, Martin Robinson – clarinet, Christine Bruce – violin, Peter Wild – accordion, and John Jannsen – guitar) took their places ready to whisk us around the globe and back by means of folk music.
What a playlist! They started out with Gathering Peascods, an English country dance, then off to Korea for Arirang (apparently, every region of Korea has their own version), New Zealand for a Maori Christmas song Te Harinui ('great joy'), back to these islands for Links of Love and to France for La marche des cabrettaires ('March of the pipers').
This was so much fun and so exhausting that a break was now in order! Fortunately, it was time for the...
INTERVAL
Nibbles, wine, Super Hamper raffle, mingling!
Rested and refreshed, our musical tour resumed in Canada with a reel Mouth of the Tobique and took us (to the delight of a certain Jenny Collis-Smith!) via John Rutter's Candlelight Carol to a Spanish tango La Paloma, a melancholy Irish melody The Fields of Athenry and finished up with a song tune made famous by Benny Goodman The Glory of Love.
The audience (and we the choir) were just enchanted! Let's hope Folk Like Us will join us again!
Just a few more complicated logistics got everyone back in the right place... including the piano...
The second half took wing with Reginald Jaques' delightful four-part arrangement of the traditional English carol The Holly and the Ivy, with its delightful trills and twiddles and subtle interplay of voices and its wonderful rousing chorus – which, once you've sung it five times in a row – you can really belt out with abandon!
Howard Goodall's setting of the Wesleyan text of Love Divine was first performed in 2000, at a concert celebrating the 150th anniversary of the city of Christ Church in New Zealand. It is a gift for a choir, with its wonderfully lilting phrasing and stress patterns and gloriously happy climax. (If you think you've never heard anything by Howard Goodall before, think again... think 'Vicar of Dibley'!)
A change of mood followed, with contemporary American composer Morten Lauridsen's gorgeous Christmas meditation O Magnum Mysterium ('O great mystery'). It's a setting of a Latin text, and we sing it in Latin, which is no longer the common language that it once was, so it was helpful to hear Jenny's reading of the text in English: 'O great mystery, and wondrous sacrament, that animals should see the new-born Lord, lying in their manger! Blessed is the Virgin whose womb was worthy to bear the Lord Jesus Christ. Alleluia!'
As everyone who follows Audlem Voices knows, a concert isn't a 'proper' concert without something from Jenny's favourite composer, John Rutter. The ladies of the choir stepped forward to sing the version he arranged for women's voices of his very own joyful Angels 'Carol (he wrote the lyrics as well as the music). Jenny said we have our own 'angel voices', so it must be true...
Popular carols can be done to death, but there's nothing like a fresh arrangement to bring new life! We sing David Hill's delightful arrangement of Away in a Manger, in three sections. The sopranos sing the first section, with the other voices humming beneath them, then all four voices sing harmonies, and the last section is again carried by the sopranos with the other voices humming beneath them. It is simple and beautiful.
And finally!
The audience came to their feet with us to join in with another old favourite which has stood the test of time – O come all ye faithful – and bring our concert to an uplifting close!
There were cheers and claps as Jon Richards thanked Folk Like Us, and thanked Jenny for making it all possible, and thanked Naomi our accompanist for her wonderful playing, and thanked the choir for a sterling effort. It must be said that we all thoroughly enjoyed ourselves!
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KF for Audlem Voices
