Ceremony of Carols on R4

[ardcarp]

This morning's Sunday Worship featured the Winchester College Quiristers with Malcolm Archer singing the Ceremony with wonderful gusto...and some sensitivity too. Lovely solo bits. I found the theological interruptions rather annoying, but a small price to pay for hearing Britten's masterpiece on Radio 4.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06tpxx4

[Roger Judd]

Yes, a lovely performance, and a delightful surprise with which to start the day.
RJ

[DracoM]

Loved the sheer ragamuffin boyishness in those chest voices!
Hope they are proud of their efforts.
Some of the best purely vocal treble singing I've heard for a long time.

[Mary Chambers]

Thank you very much for pointing this out. I didn't know about it. I've just listened and I agree it was a lovely performance, full of life and with some beautiful solos.

[ahinton]

I just cannot get to this music. Sorry. It's not a criticism of Britten but, try as I might, it mostly grates on me.

[Serial_Apologist]

I just cannot get to this music. Sorry. It's not a criticism of Britten but, try as I might, it mostly grates on me.

I'm afraid I'm with you on this, ah.

[ardcarp]

I do not think any apology is necessary. I cannot bear Schubert's Trout Quintet...nor the banal song itself for that matter...but I am not sorry about it.

It is interesting that kids, both girls and boys, love learning and performing this piece.

[ahinton]

I do not think any apology is necessary. I cannot bear Schubert's Trout Quintet...nor the banal song itself for that matter...but I am not sorry about it.

It is interesting that kids, both girls and boys, love learning and performing this piece.

I find that piece tiresome too - and I have to confess that I find a lot of Schubert tiresome - and yet there remain a handful of his works without which I really would not want to have to live and I strongly suspect that, had he survived for another three or four decades and written much less music each year, he'd have come up with some quite remarkable works that might even have gone some way to change the course of mid-European music in the mid-19th century (although that's pure speculation on my part, of course)...

[DracoM]

Kids love singing it - it's challenging, slow, fast, mysterious and in yer face - all in the space of twenty minutes, it has a lot of the theatre about it, there are no broken voices making adult noises behind them, the lads are out there on their own and delivering.
Crumbs! I'd be a bit tired of life not to be excited by as good performance of it as the Winchester Coll Quiristers gave. .

[fsharpminor]

. . . or, indeed, the girls.

[DracoM]

Indeed.

[jean]

They could never summon up the necessary degree of boyish ragamuffinity.

[ahinton]

They could never summon up the necessary degree of boyish ragamuffinity.

That's a term which I've never previously encountered and I believe to be almost worthy of Anthony Burgess on a good day!

I still cannot summon up more than a modicum of enthusiasm for Ben Britten's CofCs, though, however well presented a performance of it might be...

[rauschwerk]

They could never summon up the necessary degree of boyish ragamuffinity.

We don't even know whether Britten had ragamuffins in mind! The piece was given its first outing by an adult choir. I find myself frustrated by even the best boys' renderings because they can't quite get round the notes (the difficult melismas in Wolcum Yole for example).

[DracoM]

Right, so the 'problem' of negotiating 'the difficult melisma in Wolcum Yule' invalidates performances by boys or whoever YOUNG voices in C of C, does it?

For crying out loud................!!!