by Daniel Hathaway
If you stop to think about it, most of our American Christmas traditions have their roots in British and German culture. Far fewer trace their origins to France, even though colonization brought French influence to a large portion of what is now the United States. Les Délices, Cleveland’s French Baroque ensemble, will join the singers of Quire Cleveland this weekend to explore this less-familiar, Gallic side of Christmas in three concerts of music by Marc-Antoine Charpentier led by guest conductor Eric Milnes.
The concerts, at Holy Trinity Lutheran in Akron on December 21 at 7:30 pm, at Lakewood Congregational on December 22 at 8:00 pm, and Our Lady of Peace on December 23 at 4:00 pm, will be anchored by Charpentier’s unique Midnight Mass on French Noëls. “There are eleven French Noëls incorporated into the Mass either in instrumental interludes or in ingenious interpolations throughout the text,” Milnes said in a telephone conversation. “Almost every main motive is derived from a carol tune. It’s hard for us in our Anglo-German culture to imagine a mass built on Silent Night or Joy to the World.”
Will all those tunes be as familiar to the audience as the carols he mentioned? “Maybe one or two of them have made their way into our holiday traditions, maybe not,” Milnes said. “I have the benefit of working a lot in Québec, so I get to experience more directly how that population relates to the tradition. But these carols are still far less known, far less performed, and far less familiar than their German or English counterparts, even in the Baroque community.” [Read more…]