Sunday Playlist - 12/20/2020
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLzrVlXh4mc1N8jZ0srejRABz8FQYr1HGR
I finished the playlist before hearing the news of the shooting of a child in the neighborhood of our church. The sorrow of these pieces takes on a different resonance now. Suffice it to say that, in the words of Isaiah so often applied to Jesus, he was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief.
The list for the final Sunday of Advent sprang from the first piece, a contemporary setting of a poem by William Blake, “The Lamb.” In the voice of a child speaking to a lamb, it’s spoken with innocent assurance. But with dissonance and modal harmonies, Tavener points to the somber subtext of the poem, for the lamb’s destiny is sorrowful.
That sorrow is tangible in Jessye Norman’s a cappella performance of “Sweet Little Jesus Boy,” an African American spiritual. The speaker understands being ostracized and misunderstood, and laments the suffering that awaits the “sweet little holy child.”
If there are angelic choirs in a paradise, I imagine that they sound like the next work, Morton Lauridsen’s “O Magnum Mysterium.” Lauridsen’s version of the Latin nativity song is sublime—how can we not use that term for such a piece? One of the many aspects that I love is the line “ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,” that animals should see the newborn Lord. Please listen closely at around 4:50, as the chorus returns to this line. I think that Lauridsen wants us to marvel at the mystery in this story. Animals—our fellow creatures that humans so often mistreat and destroy (think of that lamb’s destiny, for example)—bed down quietly beside the incarnation.
Es ist ein Ros entsprungen is our familiar “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming,” probably dating from the Middle Ages. The melody was harmonized by Michael Praetorius in 1609, but while the version by VOCES8 essentially follows that harmony, it is like none other I’ve heard. It has the quality of contemplative prayer.
Finally, we return to the image of the lamb, but now we are the lambs, and Christ the shepherd. “He shall feed his flock” is from Handel’s Messiah, performed here by members of the English ensemble, The Sixteen
