The bouncy, jouncy, jingle-belling, present-selling, plastic Christmas clamor in every store and shopping mall (how does anyone work retail at this time of year and stay sane?) is one of the best reasons I know for ordering gifts from catalogs. But when it’s carefully chosen and sparingly played, Christmas music can be one of the true joys of the season. Happily there’s a lot of good Christmas music available, and a variety of fine Chicago choruses have made recordings for the holiday.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The two seasonal offerings by the William Ferris Chorale–Make We Joy and Christmas With the Chorale–both suffer from a certain unevenness in quality. Some of that is due to the hazards of live recording–that someone flats or sings with less beauty of tone–and some is probably due to the patchwork of recording dates and inevitable personnel changes over the years: Make We Joy was recorded between 1986 and 1990, while Christmas With the Chorale offers cuts from 1986 through last February. Both have a more explicitly religious slant than some of their competition, and both offer music not found anywhere else, including of course compositions by William Ferris. Although the performance is not quite perfect, Franz Biebl’s “Ave Maria” on Christmas is a nifty piece of music that deserves a wider hearing, and Ferris’s own setting of “Hail Mary” is lyrical and lovely, a fine addition to the literature. To order either album, call 325-2000.
For a sampling of eastern European carols, check out News of Great Joy, one of two Christmas-music recordings from His Majestie’s Clerkes; it contains one Ukrainian, one Polish, and one Latvian carol, along with Spanish, French, English, and American songs. On this recording and their earlier In a Cold Winter’s Night, the Clerkes offer an outstanding sampling of less-familiar pieces, anchored by the well loved (yes, they do “In dulci jubilo” and the “Sussex Carol,” not to mention “Go Tell It on the Mountain”). Night includes a couple of fun numbers by the American composer William Billings and Hugo Distler’s exquisite arrangement of “Lo, How a Rose.” News includes three arrangements by Clerkes director Anne Heider and three lovely Renaissance motets, along with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s version of the “Gloucestershire Wassail.” Both belong on the shelf next to the King’s College Choir and the Boston Camerata.
