Something about the month of December seems to be good for creating choristers. I was looking at the birthdays on BCSD and there are a lot of well-known boys who were born during this month.
Aled Jones, Anthony Way, Jean-Baptiste Maunier, Declan, C. J. Porter-Thaw, Bill Goss, Donny Osmond, Aaron Carter, Joseph McManners, and from Libera, Kavana Crossley, Joe Snelling, Liam Connery and Daren Geraghty were all December kids.

When I discovered Libera I had to rush out and get every recording I could find. It was particularly nice to find Angel Voices 3 by the St. Philips Boy’s Choir, a collection of Christmas songs. This period of Libera's recording history gives us some of the very prettiest voices like Liam O'Kane, Darren and Stephen Geraghty, Alex and Chris Baron and Adam Harris. All of them have something special, a confidence and a level of skill that you might not expect from such youthful voices.

This was my first introduction to some of the great English Christmas songs like In the Bleak Mid-Winter, the Holly and the Ivy and Gaudete.
Several of the songs on this CD were new for me, such as Cliff Richard’s Saviour’s Day, a modern classic from 1990 with a wonderful melody.

Apparently, lots of people recorded versions of Walking in the Air, the song that Peter Auty sang for the animated television show, but this is a very good rendition by Liam O'Kane.

An interesting song is In Dulci Jubilo which is the tune to Good Christian Men Rejoice. These original lyrics are thought to have been written around 1328 by Heinrich Seuse.

They added a fun verse, about sun and palm trees in Beverly Hills, to White Christmas that most singers don’t include. Liam O’Kane solos on this one and it always makes me smile.

Classic carols like Away In a Manger, The First Noel and Silent Night are just wonderful. Especially nice is the way O Come All Ye Faithful is done without the usual adult voices that most choirs rely on to give the song more power. It’s maybe even more lovely with just the boy’s singing.

I’ve always loved Do You Hear What I Hear and little twelve year-old Adam Harris solos on this one and he’s really charming.

There are twenty songs on this CD and they are all excellent. I listen to this all year long.

Maybe my favorite Christmas CD in my collection is the American Boychoir’s Carol album. It’s everything Christmas music should be. The singing is powerful and rich, the orchestral arrangements are brilliant and stirring.

The liner notes say it best, “The American Boychoir, performing with orchestra, chamber ensemble, organ and carillon in the cathedral-like acoustics of the Princeton University Chapel, brings a new sound to this joyous music. The delicate yet brilliant sounds… combine to create a new listening experience.”

They open with, from the Ukraine, Carol of the Bells which makes great use of the carillon and then they move into a regal sounding Joy to the World with a full orchestra that fills the hall to the rafters with joy.

There is a new song that I was not familiar with, This Christmastide (Jesseye’s Carol) and it’s really lovely and soft. The organ is perfect with the voices and together they build to a thrilling peak. It makes me tingle.

Christmas Day, by Gustav Holst, is a great medley of Good Christian Men Rejoice, God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Come Ye Lofty, Come Ye Lowly and The First Nowell. There is some complex layering of voices here.

Silent Night! Holy Night!, O Holy Night, Away in a Manger… these are filled with those fabulous American Boychoir harmonies that James Litton designs so well. I know that Angelic is an adjective that is overused to the point of becoming trite, but heck, what other word is there to describe this sound?

I’ve never heard a more beautifully haunting version of What Child is This? It’s very moving. I’m not always accurate when it comes to identifying certain instruments in the orchestra but I believe what I’m hearing here is harp, oboe, flute and violin among others. It’s a great combination.

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing and O Come, All Ye Faithful are loud, powerful and uplifting songs and the choir sings them perfectly.

We Wish You a Merry Christmas is a short, pretty version that is less than two minutes long and the interesting thing about it is that the coda was composed by a 14-year-old member of the choir.

I give this album my strongest recommendation. If it doesn’t put you in the Christmas spirit, well, you might need to be visited by some ghosts to adjust your attitude.

Fa-la-la-la-la La-la-la-la

Several years ago the children’s choir was performing their part of the church Christmas program and my nephew, who was six, had a small verse to sing.

He knew the words perfectly but when he stood in front of all those people he forgot all of it. I could see that he was struggling but finally he started singing the first thing that came to mind, a little ditty that my brother had taught him.

Jingle bells
Shotgun shells
Rabbits all the way
One jumped up,
Shot him in the butt,
The other one got away.

Everyone laughed and turned to look at my brother who tried to sink through the pew, and his wife, who slapped him on the back of his head.
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Over the past few years I have made my own holiday traditions. Around Christmas time I buy a bottle of Godiva chocolate liqueur and a bottle of Bailey’s. A couple of fingers of these mixed in equal parts makes the best chocolate milk ever. It’s great to sip one on a cold night sitting in front of the fire with a good book and some boys singing carols on the stereo.

I always save a few vacation days for that period between Christmas and the New Year. The house is decorated with lights and greenery and ornaments, the gifts have been exchanged and everyone has gone home, the candles smell of cinnamon and the Vienna boys are keeping me company. If I’m lucky there will be snow.

Maybe I shouldn’t tell this, but one thing I like to do each year is to make a compilation CD of my favorite Christmas music and give it to my friends. I find some pretty picture on the internet to use as a CD cover and slap a title on it, then I buy those round adhesive labels and print them to put on each disc. It all looks pretty professional.

I have a lot of Christmas albums by boy choirs so it’s fun and sometimes hard to pick my favorite version of each song, but it's a gift that everyone enjoys receiving.

This may not be exactly legal to do (so don‘t tell Libera), but I only make a dozen copies and they are for people who would not buy the albums anyway. I feel like I’m doing a good thing by promoting the artists and, besides, I think if I was really being bad I wouldn’t get so many cool new CD’s from Santa.

Everyone knows that the Vienna Boys Choir Brucknerchor is touring the US but do you ever read the reports they give on the WSK home page?
If you want a good laugh you should take a look at their blog entries. They are a lot more fun than mine and the humor makes the boys even more endearing.

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The painting at the top of this page is titled May Morning on Magdalen Tower and was painted by William Holman Hunt, one of the greatest of the Victorian Pre-Raphaelite painters.
The figures are all portraits (the boy holding the lily is his son) but Hunt never intended to paint one actual performance, only ‘to represent the spirit of a beautiful, primitive and, in a large sense, eternal service’.

Wikipedia says that “May Morning is an annual event in Oxford, on May day. It starts early at 6 am with the Magdalen College Choir singing a hymn, the Hymnus Eucharisticus, from the top of Magdalen Tower, a tradition of over 500 years. Large crowds normally gather under the tower along theHigh Street and on Magdalen Bridge. This is then followed by general revelry and festivities including Morris dancing, impromptu music, etc., for a couple of hours.” If anyone has ever been to this tell me if it is as much fun as it sounds.

I always like it when someone suggests a CD to me and this time a friend told me about The Choir of Magdalen College and their new release Carols By Candlelight, Music for Advent and Christmas. This is not the usual collection of carols that everyone else does. The album is divided into sections, The Fall, Good Tidings, The Annunciation, The Birth of Jesus and Epiphany.

There are a few songs that are familiar like O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day and Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, but most of the songs are new to me and new music is always welcome.

There are songs like I Look From Afar by Palestrina, Britten‘s A Hymn To The Virgin, The Truth From Above by Ralph Vaughan Williams and quite a few more. An especially beautiful number is In Dulci Jubilo by Pearsall, with a soloist named Alexander Knighton.
This is my first CD from the Magdalen College Choir but I’m going to look for more.

I am listening to another CD that I got from Lammas Records. This one is Britten-Missa Brevis and Other Works For Treble Voices featuring Kieran White and the Boy Choristers of Wells Cathedral.
If I close my eyes I can pretend I’m sitting in those dimly lit stone walls and hearing the rich, clear voices of the boys echoing through the church.

Little Kieran White has a fine quality to his singing and he’s one of those singers who can roll his R’s with ease. That’s something I hear in the English cathedral choirs but not so much in the American ones. Apparently it's something that usually has to be learned as a child and they don't teach that here. I like it,though.

The Wells choir is as beautiful a choir as you could want. They do a variety of songs, starting with Britten’s Missa Brevis which is a really interesting mass. I especially love the Benedictus and the Agnus Dei with their dark mood.

Young Ned Berry sings When I Survey The Wondrous Cross, one of my favorites songs. The choir sings Ireland’s Ex Ore Innocentium, Faure’s Pie Jesu, A Grateful Heart by Mary Plumstead and several other good songs.

Most of the songs on this album are solos by Kieran, accompanied by piano or the organ. Be Still For The Presence of The Lord by Archer is one that I particularly like and so is If With All Your Hearts by Mendelssohn.

This is a 2004 release recorded mostly in Wells Cathedral by Lance Andrews, who has retired from Lammas Records. I can’t think of a finer career than to visit cathedrals hearing and recording boys singing. It would be an enjoyable thing to do for a living as well as saving some wonderful music from disappearing forever.

It is interesting that since 1994 Wells Cathedral has a choir of eighteen girls as well as their boys choir. This CD is done by the boys.

A bit of history: The wells, which gave the city its name, are natural springs which can be found in the garden of the Bishop's Palace, including the holy well of St. Andrew.
In 909 the church of St. Andrew became the first Wells Cathedral. By 1180 the foundations of a new church in the Gothic style were being laid to the north of the old one.
In 1477 Bishop Robert Stillington embarked on a complete rebuilding of the chapel on a grand scale. The foundations of this cruciform building are what can be seen today in the Camery garden. This grand chapel did not last long and was blown up with gunpowder in 1552 because Edward VI had abolished Chantry chapels in the height of Reformation zeal.

Alan Mould, former Headmaster at St. John’s College choir school in Cambridge has written The English Chorister, A History, a book that’s packed with interesting information dating back to Biblical times.
I’ve mentioned it before and I still like to explore it. I have a tough time remembering all the dates and names and details, though. It might be easier if it were written more like a story than a text book but it’s still fun to sift through it. Some parts are very sad. For example…

Choral music in England was not always appreciated as it is today. During the Protestant Reformation the choirs were shut down until sanity could once again be established. During the reign of Elizabeth I choirs were nurtured and at that time Richard Hooker wrote “Church music is in truth most admirable… They must have hearts very dry and tough” who do not draw spiritual delight from it.

In 1572 the Puritans submitted to Parliament that cathedrals were “the dennes of all loitering lubbers, wher Deane… Canons… the cheefe chaunter, singing men… squeaking queresters, organ players… live in great idleness and have their abiding.”
Reading that passage makes me think that much of the ignorance of the Reformists could be tied to their inability to spell.

Things continued to worsen and later, in 1642, Canterbury Cathedral was sacked, the books ruined and the organ damaged. Windsor Castle saw its choristers expelled. At Winchester Cathedral the music books were burnt and the organ wrecked. The same damages occurred at Chichester, Peterborough, Norwich and other cathedrals.

“At Hereford, York and Exeter… choristers were driven out with the jeering cry, ‘boyes, we have spoiled your trade, you must go and sing Hot Pudding Pies’.” I have no idea what that means but it sounds quite rude.

John Vicars wrote: “Whereas there was wont to be heard nothing but Roaring-boyes, tooting and squeaking Organ-pipes and the Cathedral-Catches of Morley…the bellowing Organs are demolish’d and pulled down and the (choristers) driven out…”
They considered it an improvement and in 1643 “the sound of boys’ voices singing in quire was utterly silenced throughout England”.

It’s hard to imagine. Fortunately, the sons of the men who were expelled from the choirs became the next generation of singers. I love a happy ending.

Ask and ye shall receive. I just noticed something a couple of days ago. On the Libera home page they are giving us a free download of a new song, ‘O Sanctissima’, that will be on their next CD which is hoped to be released in March, 2010.
It’s a beautiful song and it’s unmistakably Libera.

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With the great number of choral songs that have been written over the centuries it is little wonder that there are so many I have not heard yet. I do keep on trying, though.
There are a lot of beautiful songs that have become standards, at least for boy choirs. For example, I have almost 20 versions of Pie Jesu, at least 10 of Miserere and 10 of Ave Verum Corpus.

But I have also found songs that I love which are somehow less popular and I wonder why these are not performed more often. Perhaps I'm just not finding the right CD's.

Everyone knows Franck's Panis Angelicus but have you heard his Alleluia! from the Choeur de Pacques? The Choir of King’s College sing it on their Heavenly Voices CD and it's really gorgeous. The funny thing is that I can't find much about it on the internet, not even the words.

I think it must take a special voice to sing Peuri Conceniti by Herbeck because of those extra high notes near the end. The Vienna Boys Choir tackle it easily on their Ave Maria CD and Jean Baptiste Maunier does a pretty version but those are the only two that I have found.

Winchester Cathedral, on a CD titled Allegri Miserere and Other Choral Favorites, has a very good soloist singing This Is The Record of John. I’ve only found it on one other CD, but what a unique song. I love the way the choir repeats each verse and changes it to make it sound more complex.

Zuercher Sangerknaben has a CD called Ave Maria which has a lot of different versions of that song by different composers but one that I had not heard before is the one by Paolo Tosti. It’s sung by a tenor and sounds like it could be from an opera.

The Choir of the Abbey School at Tewkesbury has a Favorite Hymns CD that features more than one outstanding song, but the one I love best is I, The Lord Of Sea And Sky. One particular boy chorister has a voice that shines forth even though the others are singing just as loudly. This is a great song that has great lyrics, like “I will break their hearts of stone, give them hearts of love alone.”

I’m not sure what my point is, maybe that we should always welcome music that we are unfamiliar with because there’s no telling when a gem will pop up. I know a lot of people who still listen to the same music they listened to in high school or college and they’re happy with that. Not me.