The Red Deer Symphony Orchestra delivered a big, sparkly musical Christmas card to the community on Saturday that encompassed the full spectrum of seasonal entertainment — from the comical to the profound.
Everything from a hearty rendition of Jingle Bells, to festive works by 17th century Italian composers, and music director Claude Lapalme’s adaptation of Canada’s oldest Christmas carol were performed at the Yuletide Songs concert at the Red Deer College Arts Centre.
While the concert featured the local choir Soliloquy, the first half was performed without vocals by a strings-only orchestra.
The musicians started with two gentle and stately high-brow Baroque compositions that painted a picture of what Christmas might have looked like 350 years ago in Italy.
Lapalme said the nativity is represented in Francesco Manfredini’s Concerto Grosso in C Major by a gentle, bucolic processional theme, as if groups of pipers were accompanying shepherds to visit the baby Jesus.
“Who heard some pipes?” joked Lapalme, raising his arm in the air, after the violin, viola, cello and bass players finished performing the final peaceful movement, which offered only echoes of the kind of tune pipers might play. “It’s rare that we ask a (strings) musician ‘Can you sound more twangy?’” he added, with a chuckle.
Arcangello Corelli’s Concerto Gross in G Minor offered a slightly more energetic rendering of the same kind of Baroque composition that featured back and forth sallies between musicians that Lapalme described as duelling melody lines, or “anything you can play I can play more ornately.”
The pastoral last movement of the concerto ended so quietly Lapalme had to prompt the audience into applause.
No prompting was required after Lapalme’s spectacular adaptation of The Huron Carol, a tune that was originally written as a Christian teaching tool by Jesuit missionary Father Jean de Brébeuf in 1643.
Lapalme described his orchestrated version as a fantasy, arranged to bring the history of the carol through the mist of time to a modern audience.
With melody lines that trail off and weave upon each other, his fantasy mingles the original French melody upon which the tune was based with the popular piece of Christmas music that has evolved through the centuries to be taught to thousands of Canadian school children.
Far from being a straight orchestration, this musical work is like haunting dreamscape. Different musical snippets, including a little dance melody, fade in and out as the strings musicians overlap melody lines and occasionally play discordantly, as if time was stretching and compressing and folding in on itself.
Lapalme’s version of The Huron Carol, was definitely an audience favourite, receiving a hearty round of well-deserved applause.
Christmas entertainment was pushed several centuries forward in the second half of the concert, which featured the Red Deer community choir Soliloquy, led by Lisa Ward, and brought the RDSO’s horns, woodwinds and percussion back into the fold.
The choir did a rich, mellow version of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, which was first sung by Judy Garland in the 1944 movie Meet Me in St. Louis, and variations on The First Noel, which Lapalme said is either a medieval French tune or an old English melody, depending on which side of the English Channel you’re standing on.
Soliloquy’s version had a big, booming kettle drum ending that went over well with the full-house crowd.
The 37-member choir took an unusual approach to The Nutcracker theme by delivering it in a sort of beatbox style that substituted the plinky instrumentals with vocal fa-la-las. Lapalme joked that this new take on a perennial Christmas standard made it less annoying.
While Soliloquy went on to perform In the Bleak Midwinter (who knew it was written by Gustav Holst, of Planets fame?), the sombre Russian carol This Holy Night, and comical variations on Jingle Bells, my favourite was the choir’s rendition of The Christmas Song, by Mel Tormé and Bob Wells.
The “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” tune was delivered with just a hint of its jazzy roots and a dollop of the heartfelt quality that made Lapalme conclude — quite rightly — that “this is a song you can’t hear too often at Christmas time.”
lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com