RVW always tinkered with Christmas music his whole life. Though a professed agnostic, he certainly put his heart and soul into much of this music, and he profited handsomely by it. Starting with the very early English Hymnal, published in 1906, he work with this music not only established generations of hymn singers with outstanding arrangements, but found its way into subsequent more “serious” music. His Fantasia on Christmas Carols was created in 1911 not long after his Five Mystical Songs, using the same stylistic premise. The score is delicate, lovely, and unobtrusively pietistic, not loaded with difficulties, and lets the choir sing not only in a “normal” manner but with syllabically shaped sounds as well.
The more substantial Hodie (“This Day”) takes us to the very end of the composer’s life when he returns to the seasonal vicissitudes once more and gives us one of his finest choral creations. Based on Nativity-influenced texts by poets as disparate as the gospels, John Milton, Thomas Hardy, George Herbert, and Henry Drummond, and the composer’s wife Ursula, VW makes a thoroughly wonderful setting of the Christmas story that is most ingratiating to choir and orchestra alike. Particularly affecting is the use of a unison children’s choir as the narration. While it does not employ overly-dramatic effects, the music is big-boned enough to lay down a solid wall of fine emotional effect in a tempered and harmonious manner. It is not played nearly enough.
The classic David Willcocks recording from 1965 is still available on EMI and has practically held the fort alone for years. It is a fine reading, but I can’t say it is any better than this new one, freshly minted with decent, spacious sound, and all the forces reverently committed to the score. A fine effort then, though I am going to be Scrooge-like and announce a ½ mark deduction for any recording that should have provided texts and translations but did not. This is a cheesy, ridiculous policy that puts the onus on the buyer to go out to a website to get the texts, when the company could have provided them by paring down the hoopla about the artists. Do I really need to know every orchestra that soprano Janice Watson has performed with? There are biographies and there is useless fluff, and when the latter comes at the expense of a legitimately needed part of the production (like texts) then the production must be assumed to be flawed.
— Steven Ritter
