Category: Christmas

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A Christmas Carol

This simple song really speaks to me, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (with Jorg Demus accompanying) just makes it all the more powerful. Listening to DFD, is it any wonder that I first began appreciating the German language when I heard him sing, 40-*mumble* years ago?

[audio:Weihnacht-DFD-excerpt.mp3]

Weihnachtslied

    (Christmas Carol)

 

    Carl Reinecke (1824-1910)

Es senkt sich hehr und leise die heil’ge Nacht herab,
die Nacht, die uns vor Zeiten der Welten Heiland gab;
und Orgelton und Glockenklang ertönen weit und breit
und bringen uns die Kunde: “Christ wurde uns geboren heut!”

(Sublime and quiet, the holy night descends,
The night that, ages ago, gave to us the worlds Savior;
And organ tone and ringing bells sound far and wide
Bringing us the tidings: Christ was born for us today!)

Und Scharen sel’ger Kinder umstehn den Weihnachtsbaum,
der jetzt im Glanz der Kerzen verklärt manch schlichten Raum;
und in der Glocken Töne mischt Kindersang sich ein:
“Gott in der Höh’ sei Ehre und Frieden soll auf Erden sein!”

(And crowds of blissful children stand round the Christmas tree,
And now the glow of candles transfigures many a simple space;
And the song of children mixes with the sound of the bells:
Praise be to God on high and there shall be peace on earth!)

DFD also recorded a collection of Christmas poetry, “Weihnachten mit Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau” and this poem suits the carol above very well, IMO:

Über die Geburt Jesu

Nacht, mehr denn lichte Nacht! Nacht, lichter als der Tag,
Nacht, heller als die Sonn’, in der das Licht geboren,
Das Gott, der Licht; in Licht wohnhaftig, ihm erkoren:
O Nacht, die alle Nächt’ und Tage trotzen mag!
O freudenreiche Nacht, in welcher Ach und Klag
Und Finsternis, und was sich auf die Welt verschworen,
Und Furcht und Höllenangst und Schrecken war verloren!
Der Himmel bricht, doch fällt nunmehr kein Donnerschlag.
Der Zeit und Nächte schuf, ist diese Nacht ankommen
Und hat das Recht der Zeit und Fleisch an sich genommen
Und unser Fleisch und Zeit der Ewigkeit vermacht.
Der Jammer trübe Nacht, die schwarze Nacht der Sünden,
Des Grabes Dunkelheit muß durch die Nacht verschwinden.
Nacht, lichter als der Tag! Nacht, mehr denn lichte Nacht!

Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664)

And a very decent translation done by Leonard Forster:

On the Birth of Jesus

Night, brighter-than-bright night! night brighter than the day;
night brighter than the sun, in which that light is born
which God, who is light, dwelling in light, has chosen for himself:
O night, which can defy all nights and days!
O joyous night, in which wailing and lamenting
and darkness and everything that conspires with the world,
and dread and fear of hell and horror all were lost.
The sky breaks open, but no thunderbolt falls now.
He who made time and nights has come this night
and taken upon himself the law of time and flesh,
and has given our flesh and time to eternity.
The dismal night of sorrow, the black night of sin,
the darkness of the grave must vanish through this night.
Night, brighter than the day! Night, brighter-than-bright night!

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Wherein I Make a (Pot)LOAD of Work for Myself…

So yes, it was a foolish goal to set myself. It isn’t as though I have nothing else on my plate, after all… *sigh*

I decided to collect all the digital recordings of Christmas music I have on scattered devices all over the place together this year. Yeh, yeh, I’ve been promising myself for several years now to organize it all, and I even have a media server to put it all on, but now I’ve decided to do so with just one genre, I realize what a Herculean task I’ve set myself… and promptly began making my task bigger.

OK, I have many, many hundreds (and hundreds) of digital recordings of Christmas music–mostly sacred solo, choral, instrumental and orchestral, but also tons and tons of secular selections (pop, contemporary, humorous, traditional, etc.), and simply gathering them into one centralized collection is daunting enough, let alone classifying and organizing them. But hey, I promised myself I’d do it and so what can I do but do it?

And then I have been on a buying spree purchasing MORE Christmas music. OK, so I’ve loved the most of the Celtic Woman Christmas offerings in their past work, and the new one has some good stuff, so…

And then there were a few holes in my Mannheim Steamroller and Trans Siberia Orchestra collections…

And I’ve been meaning to pick up some Libera recordings (a boys’ choir, in case you’d not heard them; I’m a sucker for boys voices performing choral works*)… and Woody mentioned a George Shearing Christmas album on FB, while Kat, also on FB, mentioned a collection of 280 pieces on sale for $0.99 (sucked me in)… and, and…

You get the drift. *sigh* In addition to the hundreds of selections of digital recordings I already had, I’ve managed to add another 500 or so in just the last couple of weeks. *heh*

At least I didn’t commit to digitizing my massive cassette tape and vinyl collection of Christmas music this year, although I’ll have to do it sometimes soon. And also A Good Thing: I have ripped a bunch of Xmas music CDs like this one to mp3 over the years, so that’s a wee tad less to get done, at least (although I’ve not ripped the Yo-Yo Ma Christmas CD that was a gift from my Wonder Woman a couple of years ago… or more than a few others, it seems. The Canadian Brass and the Dallas Brass and quite a few others are awaiting equal time, as well… *sigh*)

Oh, well. At least it gives me something to do when I’m not

    –on a gig
    –getting the house “Xmas-ised”
    –working on new entertainment center/MPC hookups, etc.
    –giving some finishing touches to home “fixup” projects (many and varied)
    –working through my backlog (over 200) of books I want to read (and keeping them from cluttering things up while I do projects, fixups and “Xmas-izing” etc.)

Hmm, looks like anything that sounds like “work” takes up less of my attention energy than puttering tasks. Oh, well again. *heh*

*Yeh, I’ve been that way since I was 17 and invited to sing in the changed voice section (all three of us) for a boys choir that’s since gone on to minor acclaim (minor only in that it’s limited to about 1/4 of the country *heh*). Oh, this was the second year of the group, so it was still in its formative stage, but although my life had been filled with exposure to, performance in/with and other involvement with excellent music groups and amazing musicians, that experience was a revelation to me of the beautiful sound of a cappella boys’ voices. The entire performance repertoire was a cappella and the conductor was probably the second (or perhaps third) best conductor I have ever sat under, both for rehearsal and performance, and that is saying a HUGE bunch, given the batons I’ve been privileged to sit under. Do note that the Libera album linked above isn’t a cappella music, but there are a few isolated examples, and the instrumental accompaniments are all very, very well-written and performed.

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Sadly…

…almost all my Grolsch swingtops that I used in putting up the “Xmas Tree” pictured below are in use (that’s “filled with beer”), so I won’t be assembling the lil “Xmas Tree” we had in 2010 this year but will decorate using the materials we used last year.

Oh, well. I guess I’ll just have to live with having a few gallons of homebrew this year.

🙂

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Christmas Continues…

Well, we’re off in a bit to Lovely Daughter’s for a “Boxing Day” Xmas celebration. (We’ll box things for charity in the coming “boxing week”. ;-)) I’ll leave this video I just saw for anyone who might drop by:

Back, now. Had a lovely time at Lovely Daughter’s. She and her Estimable Spouse are Good Company.

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Early Gifting

Well, we opened the door a few decades ago when we instituted my Wonder Woman’s family’s tradition of opening Christmas presents on Christmas Eve. Slippery slope and all that. I slept in today (late night, got up early after a short nap and went back to bed before 5) and lo and behold! Son&Heir was around and really eager to open presents super early. OK, so Noon passed (barely) and we were opening presents for those of us who were… present. Son&Heir liked his stuff (especially the “stocking stuffers” as my Wonder Woman knew he would when she found them). And I? How was it for me? *sigh* I had thought I had family trained to standard, the standard being, “I have what I need. Focus on other folks.”

Son&Heir apparently believes in a sort of insidious disrespect of my values that precludes any cavils from me. My Wonder Woman kinda bent the standard by giving me a Moleskine cover and display protectors for a Kindle/Kindle Fire. “OK,” methought, “I can put $$ back for a Kindle/Kindle Fire. It’s not as though it’s not on my list anyway.”

Opened Son&Heir’s present to me. Yeh, you guessed it. “Well, when we got a couple of pallets of them in at work, I just figured… ”

Sucker punched me, he did. Xmas gifts are supposed to flow one way in my mind. Oh, well. At least he knows CPR. *heh*

Thanks bubba. Good one. I’ll get you back, though. 🙂

And, apologies, sweetheart, but I may not get much more detail work done on your Christmas present today… 😉

No, I’m not posting this with the Kindle. Sensitivity and size of the keyboard on the thing is something I need to become used to before I’ll be doing much of that. But I am listening to one of the Christmas albums I have stored on my Amazon Cloud account via the Fire. Nice sound from the speakers for such a small device, but simply wonderful sound via the ear buds I’m currently using. I’ll post other comments on the device later, perhaps, as I become more familiar with it. One thing: I don’t view the WiFi-only limitation as a limitation, and given the fact that I can store an unlimited number of mp3s as well as an unlimited number of other media purchased from Amazon on my cloud drive, I don’t view the storage limitations as anything that will concern me.

OK, so the Fire’s Silk Browser appeared to completely suck at displaying web pages. Found the fix here, in case a reader here has the same issue (only half a page displaying, other half blank screen). It seems Amazon customer service knows about the issue and has a workaround ready to go… for those who will look it up. I wonder how many folks will instead just say, “This sucks” and return their device, though. Amazon needs to push a fix for this.

OK, so I was planning on connecting a lil compy connected to the living room stereo to stream Xmas mp3s from my Amazon Cloud storage. The Kindle’s easier. Connected via the headphone jack. CLICKed on Music, my library of mp3s popped up, Bob’s your uncle. Nice. Currently playing the short list of Il Volo’s Christmas songs mini-collection (Silent Night; Panis Angelicus; Christmas Medley: Jingle Bells Rock / Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow / It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year; The Christmas Song; Stille Nacht). I can definitely tell the boys have had extensive coaching in English pronunciation, though their native Italian vowels and consonants do sound through.

OK, just watched The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009, the Swedish version) on the device. Used ear buds after the first few minutes. Big difference. Good flick, true to the book. Even the physical settings were very close to my imaginings from the book’s descriptions. And, it was a good movie-watching experience on the Fire. Amazon may actually have found a way to get me to pop for its Prime service.

Even better: all three Stieg Larsson books have been filmed by the same folks with the same cast. Watching “…Played With Fire” now.

…and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest. Three movies that faithfully represented Larsson’s powerful novels. In fact, because of the format, the movies may have told the stories slightly better, in some ways, as Larsson’s narrative sometimes bogged down a tad. Oh, there were large portions that were excised–whole swaths–from each of the books, but the material that was excised just leaned the narrative down to Lizbeth Salander’s story a bit more. Well-acted, directed in such a way that the direction was almost unnoticeable. Very well-done. And by the end of the third movie, I was picking up more and more of the Swedish dialog, even noticing where the subtitles elided over material that I had caught.

A very enjoyable experience. Thanks, Son!

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Down to the Wire

The kitchen redo for my Wonder Woman’s Xmas present is getting close–well, apart from repainting the kitchen cabinets… again (just done this summer, but still ;-)). Below see an almost finished “coffee shrine” replacement for the former coffee brewing nook. Needs some trim finishing out and the new surface for the cabinet, etc., isn’t fully painted yet, but most of the rest is done, and I even got the dining room painted the new wall color, first tested out on the south wall of the kitchen.

OK, so I also don’t have the plate rack installed for the dinner plates. It’ll come.

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One Reason the Hivemind Hated Him

‘S’all right, Ronnie, the same kind of people hated Him, too (1; 2).

Meanwhile, idolatry strikes again as the National Christmas Tree becomes the National Obamassiah Tree. Hmmm, seems I’ve read about something similar happening in Jewish history…

Yeh, yeh, I know the decos on the National Xmas Tree aren’t all about The Zero, but no one’s been able to find one about Christ or even Christmas on the thing so far, so…

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Exceedingly Fair* Fare

Those of you familiar with the tune (Holst’s CRANHAM) will automatically hear the words it’s usually associated with**. For those who don’t *sigh*, well, there’s always Google… or, here ya go.

The tune always reminds me that it really needs an artist (no, not what passes for an “artist” with the typical recording industry exec, a real one) to make it work for me with Christina Rossetti’s words, especially since singing the tune with the last verse of Rossetti’s poem is problematic. The meter of the tune and the meter of that last verse do not marry well, you see. But, Tine Thing Helseth makes me forget all that.

An absolutely beautiful performance. It’s from her Christmas album, My Heart Is Ever Present. It’s a strong argument of the presence of imago dei in real art.

I could listen to this all day long.

* Continue reading “Exceedingly Fair* Fare”