Canada’s oldest Christmas carol will be given the Claude Lapalme treatment in Yuletide Songs, the Red Deer Symphony Orchestra’s most festive concert of the season.
The Huron Carol was adapted several years ago for orchestral performance by the RDSO music director, who’s earning a nationwide reputation for creating fine adaptations of popular music, such as Ian Tyson and Joni Mitchell tunes.
Lapalme had the goal of bringing the carol’s haunting strains “out of the nebulous past” and into a modern concert hall. To that end, The Huron Carol will be played by the RDSO during a Saturday, Dec. 10, Christmas concert at the Red Deer College Arts Centre that will also feature the local choir Soliloquy.
Adapting the song for full orchestration was easy, added Lapalme, who had a clear concept in mind. He took about four hours to weave the carol’s roots — the melody of the old French song Une Jeune Pucelle (The Young Maid) — in with the way the carol has evolved over the years.
“I wanted to bring the original tune to the tune it eventually became as it travelled by word of mouth,” said Lapalme.
The Huron Carol has gone through great changes since being written in 1643 as a Christian teaching song by Jesuit missionary, Father Jean de Brébeuf (who was martyred by the Iroquois a few years later).
When translated from the Huron language, Brébeuf’s lyrics spoke of “spirits who live in the sky” and anointing Jesus’s head “with the oil of the sunflower.” “The original Huron has a really rustic feel to it,” said Lapalme, who believes Brébeuf was a master at blending the Christian messages of the nativity with woodland spiritual references familiar to the Hurons.
Brébeuf’s literal lyrics were completely changed, Anglicized and poeticized in 1926 by Jesse Edgar Middleton, who came up with the “moon of wintertime” image, along the “mighty Gitchie Manitou.” Singer Bruce Cockburn considered Middleton’s “children of the forest, free” reference to be so patronizing that he sang in the original Huron on his Christmas album.
The RDSO audience will hear no lyrics at all — the carol will be performed by orchestra alone at the RDSO concert, as will three seasonal baroque works: Arcangelo Corelli’s Concerto per la notte di Natale, Antonio Vivaldi’s Il Riposo — per santo Natale and Francesco Manfredini’s Con una Pastorale per il Santissimo Natale.
But Soliloquy will throw some contemporary ho-ho-ho entertainment into the mix. The 40-member community-based choir, formed in 2004 by director Lisa Ward, will sing such seasonal favourites as O Holy Night, The Christmas Song, a vocal version of the Sugar Plum Fairy theme from The Nutcracker, and variations on Jingle Bells.
“It will be a little bit of everything,” promised Lapalme.
He believes the 8 p.m. concert will be inspiring — or should at least put everybody into the Christmas shopping mood.
Tickets are $47 ($45.50 seniors/$32.50 youths/or seats in the first four rows) from Black Knight Ticket Centre.
lmichelin@www.reddeeradvocate.com