We began listening to our collection of Christmas music yesterday evening. It started off as one rumbustious folk album of seasonal music, which we used to listen to on Christmas Eve, then I bought a couple of CDs of carols, which were nice to have on Christmas Day, though I think that technically they are meant for Advent, so Christmas morning is too late. Year by year the quantity of albums grew, until we realised that if we left it until Christmas Eve we were never going to get through all of them.
We kicked the season off with Thea Gilmore's Strange Communion. This was something of a hit for her in 2009, and the track That'll Be Christmas has had a lot of Radio 2 airplay, so you may have heard it. She is a fine songwriter, who deserves to be better known, but probably suffers from the marketing problem of not fitting into a tidy musical category. Not really folk, not pop, not easy listening.
Then I sneaked in Trio Medieval doing Folk Songs, although it doesn't belong in the Christmas collection and has nothing to do with Christmas, or any other seasonal festivity. They are a female trio, two from Norway, one Swedish, whose voices have an unearthly harmony which followed on very well from Thea. And I love the album, and haven't listened to it much yet. It needs decent speakers, the portable machine in the ironing room doesn't do it justice. I first heard them on Radio 3 and was transfixed, and totally unable to work out what the music was, old or new, traditional or classical.
Then it was the Systems Administrator's turn to choose, so we got John Kirkpatrick's Carolling and Crumpets, following on from the concert. His song about the Shropshire Wakes, which sound as though they were very jolly and incredibly drunken, includes a chorus about how young men and maids do come to shake their bums, a clear early reference to twerking.
Still to go in the box of CDs, in no particular order are firstly Karine Polwart's version of Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody. It is a beautiful take on the song, slowed down and without the thumping percussion. Who knew that Slade were making folk music, least of all Noddy Holder? I bought it as a download, but copied to disc because I am hopelessly old fashioned.
Next is the choir of New College singing a Ceremony of Carols. I think I bought a bargain offer of three albums from them for a knock down price. It's a fairly highbrow selection, with quite a high proportion of Benjamin Britten, and I think I normally listen to it while the SA is busy in the kitchen doing things to the lunch. It does have Bethlehem Down on it, which I love.
We've got The Pogues Fairytale of New York. You can't have a Christmas album collection and not have that. It's just boring having to leap up to change the disc so quickly.
Then there's another highbrow one from New College, called Carols from New College, and after that Christmas Music from St Pauls, which is reassuringly mainstream, and includes a pealing bell. After that comes A Peter Warlock Christmas, which I'll definitely have to play while the SA is otherwise engaged.
The original CD which started the whole thing off is The Waterson's Frost and Fire, a rerelease on disc of the whole of one of their vinyl albums on the Topic label, and parts of another. It is a collection of ritual and magic songs. Nobody else has come close to touching The Watersons in forty years, and when they are in full harmonic pelt they are about the wildest and most elemental thing you can imagine. Frost and Fire includes The Bitter Withy, a song about how the infant Christ, insulted by some rich lord's children, makes a bridge out of the beams of the sun and lures them over it to their deaths. An article in one of the papers recently included this among old carols that should be revived, but it doesn't sit easily with the modern commercial version of Christmas, and I can't see the C of E taking to it. Frost and Fire is reserved until Christmas Eve, being a potent brew.
Next in the box is another Advent at St Paul's with the St Paul's cathedral choir in highbrow mode, including various bits after Palestrina, Byrd, Gibbons, and an organ Toccata on Veni Emmanuel. Then my new toy for Christmas 2013, as yet un-listened to, The Sixteen giving us an Early English Christmas, Christus Natus Est. I have high hopes of that one.
Coope, Boyes and Simpson performing Fire and Sleet and Candlelight are following in the Watersons' footsteps, but without quite the Wuthering Heights elemental quality. They are technically competent, but you have a slight suspicion that in their day jobs they might be sociology lecturers. It's rollicking stuff, though, and we'll enjoy it.
Finally come yet more Christmas Carols from St Paul's Cathedral. I think I visited their gift shop one year before Christmas. This one has nice safe traditional carols, Away in a Manger, Once in Royal David's City, that sort of thing, not even anything as alternative and faintly pagan as The Cherry Tree Carol, another one the newspaper article wanted to see resurrected. You can see why we need to start listening early.
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