Corpus Christi carol

The Songs

Anne Sofie von Otter’s choice of songs for this Christmas concert stays, with one exception, close to the traditional values and sentiments represented by the opening carol. Instantly recognisable in Sweden and immediately evocative of the season, Bereden väg för Herran (Prepare the way for the Lord) is based on an old folk-song melody with words added by Frans M.Franzen in 1812.

For the first few items the programme stays close to home too. The composer of Jul, jul, strålande jul, Gustav Nordqvist, was organist of the Adolf Fredrik Church in Stockholm for the last 35 years of his life – ­a fact which should not lead one to assume that he was an ordinary musician who in this case just struck lucky. Jul, jul, strålande jul is a rare achievement of melodic beauty and harmonic economy, creating an impression of artless simplicty perfectly matched to the text. It has long been the most popular of Nordqvist’s 200 or so songs and has always overshadowed his somewhat more ambitious but similarly seasonal and scarcely less endearing Nu är advent (Now is Advent). Geographically, the two Sibelius songs mean a departure to nearby Finland. Linguistically, since – like the vast majority of Sibelius’s works of this kind – they are set to Swedish words, it means no distance at all. Conceived as separate items between 1895 and 1909, the Five Christmas Songs were collected together and published (for no good chronological reason) as Op.1 in 1913. Nu så kommer julen, one of the earliest in the set, offers appropriately nursery-style melody and basic harmonies, while Giv mig ej glans, ej guid, ej prakt, though written four years later and more enterprising in the piano part, is similarly domestic in its hymn-like word-setting.

Of the two English songs, Quilter’s The Cradle in Bethlehem is the more traditional in style in spite of the glamourously sophisticated piano part accompanying the tenderly expressive vocal line. Britten’s version of the Corpus Christi Carol is traditional in the sense that its words are from an ancient English folk song. In the sweetness-and-light context of Christmas music however ­– as Britten demonstrated when he combined a setting of it for boys’ voices with one for women’s voices of “In the bleak midwinter” in A Boy was Born – it is an untraditionally painful reminder that there was more to Christ’s life than a Nativity. The present version, an arrangement of that in A Boy was Born, retains harmonies as enigmatic as the medieval imagery of the poem.

Cécile Chaminade was a much better composer of songs, a much better composer in general, than her present-day reputation suggests. Clearly, this is not the place for a reassessment. But Le Noël des oiseaux – which, by a combination of baroque pastiche in the piano ritornello and irresistible melodic charm in the last two lines of each stanza, transforms Armand Silvestre’s sentimental verse into poetry – is highly persuasive evidence in her defence. Certainly, she is not outshone even by the fervour of Gounod’s Noél.

As far as this country is concerned, Peter Cornelius is a Christmas-only composer – which is to say that all we regularly hear of him is the carol-service favourite, Three kings from Persian lands afar based on Die Könige from his Weihnachtslieder. All of them set to the composer’s own words, the Op.8 Christmas songs vary between the cosy domesticity of Christbaum and the comparatively risky Die Könige which in its revised version, apparently on a suggestion from Liszt, allies its vocal line with the chorale Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern.

The furthest point from Sweden touched on by today’s selection of songs is Spain. It is true that Joaquín Nin was born and died in Havana but he spent most of his life in Europe and, in the 1920s and 1930s, he was interested above all in the folk music of Spain. His ten villancicos, published in France as Dix Noëls espagnols in 1932, are a collection of Christmas songs from different regions – including a lively dance from Castille coloured by reckless piano dissonances, a gently rocking carol from the Basque country, and a resonant evocation of Bethlehem bells from Andalucia.