Customer Reviews

Fantasia on Christmas Carols/ The First Nowell/ On Christmas Night

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In the early 1980s, I purchased a used, record club LP of Vaughan Williams' nativity play "The First Nowell." I've played the LP several times each Christmas and hoped eventually for a CD version to appear. This new performance under Richard Hickox's direction should bring a similar joy to listeners as I've experienced! The CD also includes the familiar "Fantasia on Christmas Carols" but in a previously unrecorded arrangement for organ and strings. The other premier recording is Vaughan Williams' "On Christmas Night," a lovely masque from 1926 based on Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." Sarah Fox and Roderick Williams give fine performances.

This CD includes Vaughan Williams' classic "Fantasia On Christmas Carols", an old favorite which I was familiar with, but here appearing in an exciting alternate arrangement featuring strings and organ. This album also has two pieces that were new to me: one is "On Christmas Night" which is a ballet score based on Dickens' "A Christmas Carol." The other which I really enjoyed a whole lot is "The First Nowell", a nativity play for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. This latter piece features some heartbreakingly lovely arrangements of some old English Christmas folk songs. The performances and production are exemplary. And if you are an Anglophile/Vaughan Williams fan like me, there's no better Christmas music. As one critic said, with this composer "one is never quite sure whether one is listening to something very old or very new." This makes for music which is at once vital and timeless. This is one of my new favorite recordings.

While "Fantasia on Christmas Carols" is one of Vaughn Williams' most popular works, "The First Nowell" and "On Christmas Night" are much less known. Deservedly so but they still make pleasant listening and I'm still pushing my chorale to perform Nowell. And these performances are very, very good. Roderick Williams brings a welcome uncommon lightness and expressiveness to Fantasia, which he also applies to Nowell. The choir and orchestra are similarly light and crisp. Hickox definitely knows his way around a Vaughn Williams score. I probably have the same LP version of Nowell as one of the other reviewers, and this is the superior performance.

This recording features RVW's abbreviated concert version of First Nowell. Having seen the score for the work, I'd encourage Hickox to come back to this work before too long and record the full stage version. It's a much richer story and only a little longer. (No one should let that stop them from considering this recording, though!)

Great cd-arrived in record time and am looking forward to listening to it this christmas