Top 6 - Christmas Carols

My favourite Christmas carol is O Come, O Come, Emmanuel, a dark, surging piece, apparently a political invocation, ‘Redeem thy captive Israel’, with no mention of a cute baby. It says here it comes from the C12-13th and they certainly wrote them to last in those days. More recently arranged as a Percussion Concerto by James Macmillan and given a memorable performance in Portsmouth Guildhall by Evelyn Glennie with the composer conducting, its power is carried forward and renewed into our time.
Christina Rossetti’s In the Bleak Midwinter is very different but just as brilliant in doing what it does. ‘Earth stood hard as iron’ could be from Hardy and I always liked singing the mysterious, meter-satisfying line, ‘Yet what I can I give him’.
But it doesn’t all have to be dark and bleak and I’ll always have O Come, All Ye Faithful, with the chorus building through the first plaintive, ‘O, come, let us adore him’, with more of the congregation joining in for a second time and then a full blast from the whole assembly which ought to be made as rumbustuous as you can. ‘Very God’ is a great line, too.
I was always interested to know that the Feast of Stephen was the last time that Good King Wencas had ‘looked out’. It made me wonder what he had been hiding from since. Even now, many years after going to his cathedral in Prague, and realizing his name was Wenceslas, the early misapprehension hasn’t quite left me. But it is a heart-warming story of a grand man who is kind to a peasant seen gathering winter few-ew-ell. And there he is in the picture.
Ding Dong Merrily on High is another tremendously rousing effort with its extended Glorias, the obvious way a little lad who knows about little more than football hears ‘Chelsea’ in ‘hosanna in excelsis’ and the way that I have managed to outgrow the nickname ‘Ding Dong’, which I suppose I might have earned after some infant fascination with it and perhaps even impromptu performances of.
And in the tradition of making the sixth selection of this feature a bit of a novelty, I must give my usual seasonal mention to Michael Jackson’s passionate and wonderful rendition of Little Drummer Boy.