by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched a DVD I had just got from
ArkivMusic.com called Sounds Like Christmas
as part of a big sale they had on cut-out items. It was a 2002 concert from
Pforta, a school in a former Cistercian monastery near Naumburg on the Saale River in
the German state of Saxony-Anhalt (I got that
last from Wikipedia and I’m still not clear in what part of Germany that is; it was in the Russian
occupation zone that became East Germany, but the East German government
de-listed it as a state in 1952 and it didn’t become a state again until the
1990 reunification; its largest city is Halle, also called Saale), and it was a
co-production of EuroArts (the company that produced the DVD), ZDF (an acronym
for Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen, which means “Second German Television” and is
their farther-reaching version of PBS) and Arte (a French-German cultural TV
network). This is yet another indication of the tradition of public-service
broadcasting in western Europe, where national governments of whatever
ideological stripe have long regarded radio and TV as truly public resources and
not just arenas in which viewers’
ears and eyeballs are supposed to be sold to the highest bidder. The Sounds
Like Christmas concert was an oddball mix
featuring soprano Angelika Kirchschlager (Charles was amused by her last name
because it literally translates “church whipped cream,” but some other major 20th
century German singers had equally weird names, including Frida Leider —
“unfortunately” — and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, “blackhead”), the Freiburger
Barockorchester conducted by Gottfried von der Goltz, a five-man vocal group
called ensemble amarcord (I’m presuming the lower-case spelling is their choice
because the titles telling us what the pieces were called and who was
performing them were careful to keep their name lower-case) and trumpeter Tomasz
Stanko.
Kirchschlager was dressed in a full-length gown that was grey above her
waist and subtly changed to an odd color, sort of half-brown and half-lavender,
around her midsection; she looked dignified and fortunately did not do any costume changes in mid-concert as more recent
classical divas, ill-advisedly
emulating their pop namesakes, have done. The Freiburger Barockorchester mostly
performed standing up, except for the members who couldn’t because of the sheer
unwieldiness of their instruments: I was particularly taken by a huge
plucked-string instrument with 20 tuning pegs. Charles did a quick online
search on his phone and decided it was an “archlute,” a giant-sized version of
the traditional hand-held lute (the main plucked-string instrument in the West
before the Moors imported the guitar from Persia — modern-day Iran — into
Spain). It looked to me like some Western instrument maker had got hold of an
Indian sitar and thought, “Gee, I can
build something with that many strings, too!” The concert had some interesting
repertoire and a few surprises, the most impressive being trumpeter Stanko, who
first appeared accompanying ensemble amarcord in the traditional song “Le
Baylère” and then behind Kirchschlager on “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming.” I was
taken aback by the depth and richness of his tone — instead of the high, thin
tone of most solo classical trumpeters he played surprisingly like Miles Davis,
and it turned out later in the concert that he plays that way because he’s also
a jazz musician. During the program he played two quite lively jazz pieces,
“Little Thing Jesus” and “In the Silence of the Night” with a piano-bass-drums
rhythm section (though we had to wait until the closing credits to learn who
the other people were: Michal Miskiewicz on piano, Slawomir Kurkiewicz on bass,
and Marcin Wasilewski on drums), which were about the only respite we got from
the slow “reverential” tempi of most of the rest of the songs.
The only
familiar Christmas standard performed was “Silent Night,” done in German by
ensemble amarcord, though I also recognized “O sanctissima” from Eugene Ormandy
and the Philadelphia Orchestra’s early-1960’s crossover album The
Glorious Sound of Christmas, an album my
family grew up with and which is still the best-sounding Christmas crossover
album I’ve heard from a classical orchestra. “Silent Night” was of course
written by a German, Franz Xaver Gruber, and the legend is that Gruber was the
musical director of a German church in 1816 when he had the dismaying task of
reporting to the pastor that the organ had gone out of order on Christmas Eve
and therefore there would be no music for their big Christmas Eve service.
“What instruments do you have?”
the priest asked Gruber. “One guitar,” Gruber told him. “Then write a song so
simple you can play it on guitar,” the priest told him, and a classic was born.
Since it was composed in Germany, German is the original language, and as much
as I treasure the English version the German original has a special charm of
its own — I particularly like “Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh,” the German for
“Sleep in heavenly peace.” The rest of the program ranged from an aria from
Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, “Bereite
dich Zion,” with Kirchschlager and the Freiburg Barockorchester, then “Le
Bayère” and after that the orchestra (with an unidentified violinist from the
ranks taking the solo part) a full concerto by Vivaldi, Concerto in E major, RV
270: “Il riposo … per il Natale” — the DVD tracked each of the three movements
separately — followed by ensemble amarcord doing another traditional song,
“Maria durch ein Dornwald ging,” and Kirchschlager and the Freiburg
Barockorchester doing an aria from Handel’s Messiah, “Thou art gone up on high,” with Kirchschlager
singing with quite good English diction. (This has not always been the case
with opera singers performing in English — I remember getting a download of one
of the old Firestone Christmas albums featuring Joan Sutherland, Renata Tebaldi
and Leontyne Price — and ironically Tebaldi, the only one whose native language
was not English, had the best
diction of the three.)
After that Kirchschlager and trumpeter Stanko did a
version of “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming” — and then came the first of the two
unexpected jazz interludes from Stanko and his rhythm section, “Little Thing
Jesus.” (For some reason the composers of the jazz numbers were not identified
in the titles even though the composers of the other pieces were.) After that
came another complete concerto, Arcangelo Corelli’s Concerto Grosso in G minor,
Op. 8, no. 6, part of a collection published after Corelli’s death (though at
least it’s authentically by Corelli — his publishers didn’t do what Pergolesi’s
did and slap his name on a lot of music other people actually wrote, much of it
after Pergolesi’s death!), which is in six short movements (though the DVD gave
it only five tracks) ending with a “Pastorale” largo movement that apparently has become something of a
classical standard of its own. Then came Kirchschlager and Stanko on another
standard hymn, “Von Himmel hoch,” the ensemble amarcord’s “Silent Night,” and
Stanko’s second jazz interlude, following which they did “O sanctissima” and
two bits of Bach: Kirchschlager and the orchestra in “Schlummert ein, ihr
matten Augen,” BWV 82, and ensemble amarcord in “O Jesulein süss” — over which
the closing credits came up. Director Michael Beyer indulged in some of those
oddball shots of the surrounding countryside and cityscapes with which Arte
directors often use to try to make their films something more than just
performance videos — and since there was no applause it was clear that this was
a studio production and not an actual concert — but though the tempi tended to
drag a bit as the evening wore on and one wished for something faster and more
openly celebratory, it was still a quite nice and lovely movie to watch on
Christmas Eve.
