The Best Classical Music at Christmas

By Chris Billingham 

Christmas is a time that most of us connect to music in some way, whether it’s standing outside supermarkets singing carols, singing along to previous Christmas number ones or putting on that Michael Buble Christmas CD that is seemingly reissued every year. Just to be clear that isn’t a complaint! His version of Silent Night is beautiful. On Tuesday The Telegraph selected its Top Ten best pieces of Christmas classical music, a lovely read that you can find here. As regular readers will know, the Southern Sinfonia team selected its favourite pieces of Christmas music last year and I’m pleased to say that some of our choices and the Telegraph’s choices matched! It turns out great minds do think alike.

Bach’s Christmas Oratorio appears in both lists, which is hardly surprising given how popular the piece is this time of year. The six-part piece was written to be performed in church over the Christmas season of 1734, a date confirmed in Bach’s autographed manuscript. It is widely believed that the piece was not performed again until Christmas 1857 when it was played by the Sing-Akademie zu Berlin under Eduard Grell. Each of the six parts was originally intended for performance on one of the major feast days of the Christmas period. However in modern times the piece is commonly performed as one with a running time of nearly three hours. Southern Sinfonia performed the full piece twice last year, once with Windsor and Eton Choral Society and once with Bath Minerva Choir. Both performances were rapturously received and as an audience member for the performance with Windsor and Eton Choral Society I have to say that when watching it, it doesn’t feel like 3 hours. The movements are captivating and the time goes by in an instant.

A piece we have played a number of times this Christmas that is unfortunately missing from The Telegraph’s list is Handel’s Messiah, which we performed with The Old Royal Naval College Chapel Choir. This isn’t that surprising given the fact that this piece isn’t solely a Christmas piece, despite the fact that it is performed most at this time of year. The piece is also performed at Easter because it deals with Christ’s death and resurrection. However as Richard Whittall said in a recent blog for The Guardian, the fact the piece is so popular at Christmas gives it a special place in everyone’s heart:

“Since it has become an annual Christmas tradition, most choristers have sung it in every venue, in every iteration, with every instrumentation and in every tempo, no matter how deranged or pseudo-experimental. And in that time they have come to know the strange miracle of Messiah: after years of the good and the bad and the ugly, there is always something new, something breathtaking, to be rediscovered in Handel’s writing and Charles Jennens’s libretto.”

A choice, exclusive to The Telegraph list is Tchaikovsky’s ‘Waltz of the Flowers’. As Ivan Hewett states in the article “What could be more appropriate for a child’s Christmas than a magic kingdom of sweets and presents? That’s the scene for Act 2 of Tchaikovsky’s last ballet The Nutcracker.” The connection between childhood and Christmas is perhaps the reason this time of year is so special, Christmas music and all the other elements of the season people love (the food! We can’t forget the food!) will no doubt take them back to childhoods filled with Santa’s and presents. Memories that are evoked by this exuberant and youthful waltz.

What are your favourite Christmas pieces? Let us know on our Facebook and Twitter pages what you will be listening to over the next few weeks! Southern Sinfonia has had a fantastic year and behalf off the whole team I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has attended a performance, played with us, sang with us and interacted with us online. We have a lot of surprises and treats coming up next year and can’t wait to share these with you. Keep an eye on our website for more. 

We hope you have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

“Hear his faith within" - A look at choral music and religion

By James Chater 

This weekend, Southern Sinfonia is extremely excited to be performing Mendelssohn’s oratorio ‘Elijah’ with the Pangbourne Choral Society. Completed in 1849, it is a large and powerful work, and so popular that it has remained in the standard choral repertoire ever since its first performance (at the then Birmingham Festival). Like many religious works, or any work with a text for that matter, the strength of it lies not solely in the music itself, but more so in its ability to elucidate the text. The extent of Mendelssohn’s religious beliefs is contentious, but it is likely that he was a practising Christian, albeit aware of his Jewish ancestry. Is it possible that Mendelssohn’s religious convictions are present in this work? Is the work better off for the fact that Mendelssohn was conscious of the potency of the text? Or, in other words, does a composer require strong religious beliefs in order for the work to be effective?

Before answering this, it is worth bearing in mind a little history. Prior to circa 1650, a large portion of music was written exclusively for the voice, and was largely sacred vocal music. Take a handful of the major Renaissance composers: Josquin, Byrd, Tallis, Palestrina, Lassus. All of them are renowned for their sacred vocal music, and it is fairly certain that they were all religious men too. Does it correlate then, that all their religious music is convincing, owing simply to their belief? This seems unlikely.

And yet, when I list some of the most powerful works I can think of (despite not being a chorister in any way, shape or form) I am inexorably drawn to choral works. The haunting beauty of Lauridsen’s ‘O Magnum Mysterium’, the majesty of Mozart’s Requiem, or the mellifluous Requiem by Fauré. Fauré is perhaps the key to this question: his Requiem is arguably his most popular work, despite evidence suggesting he was not enamoured with the Christian faith. Fauré “was regularly seen stealing out during the sermon for a cigarette” and was fired from his post as organist at a Church in Rennes, Brittany when “he turned up to play at Mass one Sunday after arriving still in his evening clothes.” Albeit not conclusive, it is perhaps fair to say that Fauré was not as pious as someone such as Bach. But still, his Requiem never fails to move me and many others to this day; the final movement, ‘In Paradisum’ was even part of Baroness Thatcher’s funeral last year. Perhaps this is a testament to religious texts themselves; an indication that they are so ripe for musical interpretation, that a composer only needs to be relatively skilful to create a successful musical work.

I have mentioned Bach, one of the most prolific composers of all time. His sacred output is enormous with, over 200 cantatas, motets, the St John Passion, the St Matthew Passion and the Mass in B minor all to his name. This huge amount is due in part to his employment at St Thomas Church in Leipzig, where he was ‘Kappellmeister’; a position which, at times, demanded him to write a cantata per week. It is often questioned how Bach maintained such a high level of productivity throughout his time in Leipzig, and many answers centre around Bach’s faith. Bach was a devout Christian, and it is his faith that is said to have given Bach the tenacity to create this extraordinary body of works. Furthermore, it is often said of Bach’s music, that you can “hear his faith within it”; this may sound bizarre on paper, but if you do listen to some of Bach’s sacred works, you become oddly convinced by this. There is an indescribable sense of otherness about the works that is quite amazing to experience.

Of course, one thing I have ignored throughout this short piece is this question; by whose standards is it convincing? Surely everyone has varying religious beliefs and musical tastes? And you’d be right - an endless discourse could ensue as to why or when or how we are affected by sacred works, but ultimately it comes down to the individual. This however, I think is not a ‘cop-out’ answer; it is just testament to the fact that atheists can be moved by, and even write, music that would bring the most devout Christian to tears.

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Legends of Classical Music – Who? And, more importantly, why?

By Chris Billingham 

Throughout his lifetime Alexander Borodin produced a number of memorable works that have stood the test of time. My personal favourite is Symphony No. 2; from the alternations between major and minor thirds in the first movement to the use of F major in the second, the piece joyfully wanders into a number of unique directions, complemented by wonderful pacing. As well as my praise for this particular work, Borodin is held in high regard because of his powerful string quartets, and acclaimed opera ‘Prince Igor’. In a letter of 1877, Tchaikovsky stated that “Borodin possesses talent, a very great talent” and a number of other composers, academics and more have complimented the Russian composer.

Does this make him one of the greatest composers of all time? Could you attach the word ‘legendary’ to his name? Presumably it would depend on what you think the term means. One of the most common descriptions of the term is “Extremely well known; famous or renowned”. To test whether or not Borodin fits this definition, I asked a number of friends who don’t listen to or engage with classical music if they recognised the name; none of them did. They were however, familiar with Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Tchaikovsky, names that constantly appear at the top of lists of ‘the greatest composers of all time’. 

Image by buckleysoreal

Why do these names frequently top these lists? In 2011, The New York Times ran a detailed campaign to find the Top 10 composers of all time. The project opened a discussion through online videos, multiple articles and blog posts. Eventually there were more than 1500 comments, all passionately arguing the case for various composers and debating the winner. The paper’s chief music critic, Anthony Tommasini, concluded that Bach would top the list “for his matchless combination of masterly musical engineering [as one reader put it] and profound expressivity”. Is this a fair judgement? On the one hand, the sheer volume and range of art would suggest audiences connect to different things. There is a reason that we can keep segmenting art, from pastoral paintings to horror films; one expressive form cannot necessarily be compared to the other. Despite this, we attempt to do so constantly in modern popular culture, judging a singer against an acrobat on shows like ‘Britain’s Got Talent’. 

Speaking of popular culture, it could be argued that death is a factor when labelling modern artists as ‘legendary’. In my opinion this is because society is left to wonder how they would have increased their body of work. Analysing what has been can take hours, but wondering what could have been can last for an infinite amount of time. ‘Grace’ by Jeff Buckley is an incredible album and his tragic death at a young age means people will always wonder what could have been, which sounds ‘legendary’ to me. 

Despite its importance when considering other forms of art like mainstream music and film, death doesn’t seem to be an important factor when considering the greatest classical composers. Potentially because Western classical music dates back to the 11^th century, with so many composers thus historical perhaps people don’t consider how long their lifetime was. Combined with the fact that life expectancy has increased, any composer living before this period could be expected to have lived a shorter life. Henry Purcell, for example, lived to only 36 years old with an unclear cause of death, while Mozart famously died young with a huge creative output of 600 works (and the story of his poisoning by Salieri, made famous by the film ‘Amadeus’, has been disproved).

Speaking of Mozart, therefore, is status in the classical music world therefore determined by a composer’s body of work? It is estimated that Bach wrote over 1000 compositions; an incredible amount by anyone’s estimation. This said, I’m sure that most would argue that quality is more important than quality. As Tommasini explains, “though Bach never wrote an opera, he demonstrated visceral flair for drama in his sacred choral works, as in the crowd scenes in the Passions where people cry out with chilling vehemence for Jesus to be crucified.” 

Perhaps it as simple as that; skill, and a high quality of work, can make you a legend. As discussed above and in previous articles, I would still argue to an extent that every listener has their own view on what is and isn’t the highest quality. However, numerous lists of the greatest composers of all time would suggest that if the masses feel that an artist’s work is powerful and engaging, they will be referred to as ‘legendary’. I may well try and convince more people to consider Alexander Borodin…

Who would you describe as legendary? To get in touch and share your thoughts, comment below or join in the discussion on Facebook or Twitter. 

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