17 posts tagged “christmas music”
yup. i'm off. i hope you all have a fabulously merry christmas and an equally fabulously happy new year.
oh crumbs. house is in uproar. all is chaos. madly trying to clean up for the owners who are coming to do a house inspection on friday morning before we go to the airport (at 2 days' notice) as well as get everything under control for the trip itself and other christmassy and new year stuff. still no word about my camera's wellbeing and i was promised it would be ready to pick up tomorrow. and i have to have blood tests in the morning and so will be tearing about minus about a bucket's worth of blood. gah!
hope you're all feeling calmer than i am!
to assist in calmness everywhere, here's some christmas rachmaninov:
oh dear. missed another day. well, in my defence, i did try last night. i went hunting for a recording of personent hodie specially for jdavid, who seems to be the only person to have admitted to having a favourite carol in the christmas meme, but alas! in spite of my moderately wide-ranging collection of christmas music, i have no personent! i actually went through everything three times, but then lost heart and went to bed.
so, in place of personent hodie, i now present to you another latin hymn. this recording is defective in that harry christopher and the sixteen don't seem to have realised that this one needs to be sung in a broad australian accent and preferably through the nose: "gow-day-tay" etc.
because it sounds like we're likely to encounter a fair amount of rain and/or snow in copenhagen and there's nothing nicer at the end of a day tramping round in slush than to come home and have freshly cosy feet.
and now, following my discourse on foot clothing, you have forgotten that i already posted one carol, so here is another:
tomorrow i have to face the horror of cleaning up the entire house (which is in an uproar) in two days while packing, baking, organising and trying to make sure i haven't forgotton anything, because our landlords have sprung an inspection on us on friday morning before we leave for the airport. aaaaargh!
eep. very behind now. so you get two carols today, and they're kind of traditional ones because last night we went carolling, so i'm feeling oh-so trad and anon now. every year they do carolling round our area and anyone can come along and sing or knock on doors to collect for... something. new church roof perhaps? i should find out. i guess you can tell i don't go so much out of a community obligation but just because i actually like wandering around on a freezing cold night with lanterns singing christmas carols under lamp-posts. it was djeli's first outing and he actually enjoyed himself so much he even said that if he gets home in time on thursday night then he'll come along to the second session with me. we had a nice little group with some good voices, but a little light on sopranos, so i was mostly singing the tune and occasionally - eep!!! - the descant (for those of you who don't know, i am well and truly an alto and sang tenor with the boys when we did berlioz's te deum at uni. i am not built for high a-flat!), and some first-rate senses of humour were brought along too. loads of fun.
i'm not actually terribly fond of silent night generally. i believe fairly strongly that it should only be sung in german and parts and preferably by people who know what they're doing, but we actually made a fair fist of it last night. i was impressed with us :-) and we even had a request!!!
otherwise, not a terribly adventurous weekend. things have got a bit messed up, especially with djeli's second present. i've got his main one but really wanted to get a little additional something (i can't say what in case he reads this!) but because all our bank stuff here in the uk is connected to our joint account, i can't buy anything online because he'd see the charge come through on the statement, but finding this thing in a real-life store is proving molto difficile. aaargh!
some progress though: discovered that the reason we've been so sodding cold at home since the weather turned chilly is because it seems that djeli might have turned the thermostat on the heater down at the end of last winter... he's under orders to turn it back up. and as quickly as possible!
hopefully tomorrow i will be awake enough to do a proper review of the golden compass, but the short form is that i think they did quite a good job of very difficult subject matter overall. great cast. some marvellous effects (i thought the armoured bears were particularly well done) but a few of the niggles that i guess are inevitable in just about any movie adaptation of a book. more on niggles tomorrow.
went and saw the golden compass (ack! it's not a flipping compass! the book is called northern lights for a reason, you marketing twerps!) tonight. but too tired to give any sort of critique here now. i'd end up chucking in a bunch of spoilers and then everyone would hate me. except that everyone i know will of course have read the books by now because they're just too too amazing to miss, eh?
your christmas music for the day, because i'm feeling tired and sentimental is walking in the air from the snowman which seems to be a christmas classic over here but which i'd never heard of before we moved over. i know this was aled jones' party piece when he was a lad, but still. this is not him.
i am pleased to say, i have wasted just about the entire day. i count this an achievement.
this morning i woke up late and discovered that - at 11am - the frost was still thick on the ground, so how could i resist? i bundled up and went for a walk down to the park. what a perfect winter's morning - the sun was bright, the sky was blue, there were birds and squirrels and little yappy dogs all over the place and it was quite quite perfect. see?
found this on northerngeek's vox, via the explore page and, me being me, just had to inflict it on you. you know the drill - consider yourself tagged
1. wrapping paper or gift bags? wrapping paper, every time. there are a few odd occasions where gift bags work (e.g. when i was given jacques-etienne - have you ever tried to wrap a teddy bear???) but overall, they seem to indicate a lack of willingness to really try. wrapping in our family is very important. there are a few key rules: 1. wrapping for family members must be fresh, not recycled from previous years 2. wrapping and card must both be kept as secret from the receiver as the actual present, until the point where they appear under the tree 3. if possible, put a ribbon round it. maybe two ribbons. if you can squeeze in a little fluffy toy or a christmas decoration on the present too in a stylish and elegant manner, then you go straight to the top of the class.
2. real tree or artificial? artificial. couldn't handle all those pine needles. BUT i'm very fussy about my artificial trees - can't stand the plastic sort that are trying to be real. the only right sort is the type that's made from green tinselly stuff.
3. when do you put up the tree? 1 december
4. when do you take the tree down? 6 january (epiphany, twelfth night) - when at uni i used to have friends round for dinner on twelfth night, which gave me an excellent excuse to make a sort-of twelfth-night cake, filled with custard (any excuse for custard). haven't done that in ages. maybe i should do it again this year.
5. do you like eggnog? i love the word eggnog. have never actually had the opportunity to taste it though. it's not the sort of thing that goes with a 40-degree-C christmas. roast turkey, ham, christmas pudding, yes, but we seem to draw the line at eggnog.
6. favourite gift received as a child? my cat
7. do you have a nativity scene? nope. not a tradition in our family. i seem to dimly recall asking if we could get one when i was a child and being told that only catholics have nativity scenes.
8. hardest person to buy for? my da
9. easiest person to buy for? generally my mother. what tends to happen is that i can't find anything for her for ages and then i can't stop finding things for her.
10. worst christmas gift ever received? a kris kringle present from someone who didn't know me very well. it was easy to see the reasoning: likes music and works very hard = relaxation cd. what she obviously didn't realise was that that stuff makes me want to break speakers... still, it's the thought that counts, eh?
11. mail or email christmas card? both. mail for the rellies in australia and anyone i have a snailmail address for who i remember to send one to, email/blog/flickr posting for invisible online friends, people i don't have snailmail addresses for and people who i was just too disorganised to get around to sending a real card to.
12. favourite christmas movie? hard to pick just one. there's sort of a trinity of tradition here: white christmas, miracle on 34th street (the original) and it's a wonderful life
13. when do you start shopping for christmas? far too late. generally i start panicking and thinking of lists as soon as i realise that we have yet again missed the seamail deadline (start of october), with actual shopping starting about 1-2 weeks before the airmail deadline (start of december).
14. have you ever recycled a christmas present? gosh no. that would be sacrilege.
15. favourite thing to eat at christmas? the traditional christmas breakfast. every year in australia i would host a christmas breakfast for all our friends. the menu would change a little from year to year, but generally would include: ten tons of homemade gingerbread men, decorated with mini m&ms, blueberry muffins, cheerios (cocktail frankfurts, that is, not the cereal), my mother's sausage rolls, homemade alcoholic icy poles (always the mango daiquiri ones, others depending on the mood of the chef and the time available), homemade non-alcoholic icy poles (most notably lemon-lime, and a rather amazing lindt dark chocolate ice cream)
16. clear lights or colored on the tree? coloured
17. favourite christmas song? if you've been reading this blog over the past month, you'll realise that that's way too hard a question to answer. today's carol is just one of the many, but is one i particularly love singing. this recording isn't ideal (i don't seem to have an ideal one among the three or four on my hard drive) - it's a little slow and the lower parts of the glorias are a little furry, but at least they're on pitch, which can sometimes be... challenging :-)
18. travel at christmas or stay at home? stay at home. in my family it's certain death to not be around at christmas. you can imagine how popular we've been, being over here for the past two, and now this one as well. this year will be the first christmas we've gone away and also the first christmas (and possibly the only christmas!) we'll have spent on our own.
19. can you name santa's reindeer? i could, but i wouldn't like to without meeting them first. it would seem rude.
20. do you have an angel on top or a star? neither. for some odd reason, the tradition in our family is always to have a santa on top.
21. open the presents christmas eve or morning? christmas morning. although this year it will be christmas eve because of pretending to be danish, and that way we can also do our presents at the same time my parents are doing theirs in sydney on christmas morning and we can all natter away over skype.
22. most annoying thing about this time of year? postal deadlines
well, today i had my first attempt at cooking with real cranberries. i thought i'd try out a recipe for cranberry syrup from tessa kiros' apples for jam. it looked simple enough - take cranberries, moosh them about with some sugar, add boiling water, moosh some more, strain and let cool. what it failed to mention was that the cranberries were actually as hard as little bullets. i don't know if that's how they're supposed to be, but mooshing them was somewhat like popping bubble-wrap made of steel. anyway, the end result is a pretty colour. tomorrow we'll discover whether the flavour has been worth the effort!
today's carol is another by an australian composer, but this time an original carol rather than an arrangement, and by my teacher, peter sculthorpe.
not much to report. had to go back to high street kensington today and it seems that there are no blackberry snowflakes left in london. they cannot be had for love nor money. which i think is a grave error on the part of the otherwise fabulous hotel chocolat. and which unfortunately led to me buying more chocolate for myself. i now obviously cannot set foot in hsk again until at least january. maybe even february. actually possibly not till spring. too easy to give in in the cold weather.
anyway, on the topic of food is this carol. you sing it as you bring the boar's head to the table. of course. it's (not very surprisingly, i guess) a carol from (it seems) the 15th century and this version is an arrangement by the australian composer andrew ford. yes, he's still alive. no, there's still no need to be scared. just remember this one as you carry the ham from the kitchen to the table in a couple of weeks, eh?
... and prove to the world that i am not solely a highbrow elitist snob when it comes to christmas music. i'm not going to go as far as actual current pop-songs, but i confess i do adore a good lounge-music shot from time to time. hope you do too :-)
