Day: December 10, 2012

Posted on

Picky-Picky-Picky

I really like Il Volo. The boys have a great sound for such young voices, and they have good arrangers and producers providing them with well-written material that’s also recorded well.

Good stuff. One niggly lil thing though: they all have a strong tendency to take Italian vowel production into all the languages they sing in. Oh, it’s not offensive, but it is pretty glaring at times. Take “Stille Nacht” (below). Beautifully sung, but… the vowels are often not German. Oh, well. Picky, picky, picky. 😉

Posted on

My Favorite Kind of Christmas Music

Choral. In rehearsal. The clip below is from a music clinic conducted by Jester Hairston in 1981 in Odense, Denmark. The song the mass choir is rehearsing is Hairston’s “Mary’s Boy Child”–a song much butchered by soloists and choirs. It’s just s short section of the rehearsal, and I did cut out much of his oral directing, although some is left in. (No, sadly I never attended a clinic/rehearsal directed by Hairston, although I have enjoyed his music a lot over the years. It’s always a real treat to attend a rehearsal conducted by the composer of a piece, though, and just eavesdropping a bit is enjoyable for me.)

[audio:Jester-Hairston-in-Odense-Marys Boy Child–edited.mp3]