Favourite Christmas Music

[Guest]

My favourite piece of Christmas music is "O, Holy Night" by Adolphe Adam. Years ago, I worked in a music shop and I remember when the Decca recording of Leontyne Price singing Christmas music came out and we played it in the shop. The whole place stopped dead at the beauty of her singing (I was in tears myself). I still love her version of it more than any other I've heard.

As for Christmas carols, "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" has been my favourite since I was a child and I also love "Masters in this Hall", which I sang with a choir when I was about fifteen.

What's your favourite?

[EdgeleyRob]

Vaughan Williams / Hodie.

[antongould]

Terribly ashamed to admit it but my favourite version of the wonderful O Holy Night is by Perry Como - it is playing now as Lady Gould decorates the tree.

[Petrushka]

Another big Hark, the Herald fan here as well but It Came Upon the Midnight Clear would be my first choice.

Other favourites sung in my time in our local parish church choir many, many moons ago and which have remained so evocative of the season are Harold Darke's setting of In the Bleak Midwinter and the Walford Davies tune to O Little Town of Bethlehem.

[Serial_Apologist]

Vaughan Williams's Fantasia on Christmas Carols
Honegger's Christmas Cantata
Alan Bush's The Winter Journey
Rubbra's Natum Maria Virgine

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Thomas F. Dunhill's arrangement of It came upon the midnight clear
Rutter's Star and Candlelight carols
Rutland Boughton's Bethlehem

[Zauberfloete]

Terribly ashamed to admit it but my favourite version of the wonderful O Holy Night is by Perry Como - it is playing now as Lady Gould decorates the tree.

Dont' be ashamed - I'm a closet Perry Como fan myself. Have you heard him sing "Christmas Dream" at the beginning of that great film "The Odessa File"? I really like that!

[Oldcrofter]

Here a pre-Christmas present, Zauber - so come out of the closet and take a look !

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L1UDdOh-YU

[ardcarp]

Britten's Choral Variations A Boy was Born.

Holst Singers
Boys of St Paul's
Stephen Layton

http://www.holstsingers.com/recordings/30

[teamsaint]

Favourite Carol is Coventry Carol.

[Vile Consort]

The Weihnachts-Historie by Schutz. The choir performed it (with a small semi-professional orchestra) when I was at school. I can still see the three lads who sang the trio of the three kings; they will be pushing 60 now. The performance took place in December in a church whose heating had failed: perhaps that is taking HIP too far.

[Zauberfloete]

Here a pre-Christmas present, Zauber - so come out of the closet and take a look !


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5L1UDdOh-YU

Thank you, Oldcrofter!

[jean]

Terribly ashamed to admit it but my favourite version of the wonderful O Holy Night is by Perry Como...

I've got to sing it tomorrow and I wish I didn't!

But I think I'm going to prefer the Cathedral girls singing the solo part to Perry Como.

[formbyman]

O Holy Night sung by Leontyne Price is also a great favourite of mine,coupled with the Carol Symphony of Hely-Hutchinson,which I first heard on Children's Hour many,many years ago,and it never fails to take me back to those times.

[Mary Chambers]

I also love "Masters in this Hall", which I sang with a choir when I was about fifteen.

It's years since I heard that. I like it, too.

So much of Christmas is nostalgia. One of the first things I ever sang in a choir was the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on Christmas Carols, and I still have great affection for it. The Christmas music from Messiah still sends shivers down my spine, the recits most of all, especially "There were shepherds abiding in the field".

Britten's Ceremony of Carols, preferably sung by boys in a cold cathedral, with the icy droplets of the harp. No SATB versions or piano, or worse still organ!

Another vote for It Came Upon the Midnight Clear, though it may be for the words rather than the music.

I heard a version of O Holy Night in a supermarket the other day. It was almost unrecognisable. Could that have been the Perry Como, or am I maligning him?