For Those Who Want Good Old Tunes

I’ve always marveled over how appropriate the sound of brasses is to Christmas music Recently, contemplating this record, I began wondering why brasses should strike me as so appropriate, and realized how much we are limited by our experience. The notion, of course, was owing to the Salvation Army. Which in my youth used to send small ensembles of rather ill-trained lads and lassies into the streets of cities where I, a country boy, wondered at them.

I don't mean to fault the Salvation Army for laxity in brass training. It seems to me that in those primordial times brass players in general were pretty fallible. Fallibility seems no longer to pertain. I am told by people on the inside that training in the United States has attained such a peak that the fourth trumpet in your average junior-high band should be able to match Wynton Marsalis note for note. As a result, brass players, singly and in groups, have become the Kreisler and Flonzaleys of our time. I say all this because it applies to Solid Brass, heralded as "one of the premier brass ensembles in the country." Actually it appears to be urban rather than rural, drawing its personnel from that treasury of topflight instrumentalists found in New York City.

For those who want the good old tunes, there should be few if any, unpleasant surprises. The "Wassail Song" (1913) by Vaughan Williams is the last of a set of live English folksong settings. "Greensleeves" to the text tile title indicates has nothing to do with Christmas, but sung as '"What child is this" It does. The "Cant des ocells" (Song of the Birds) comes from Pablo Casals' native Catalonia, and he often played his arrangement of it as an encore.

There are several potpourris of Christmas songs: you'll have no trouble identifying the contents of the French, German, and English one, but my title-sheet does not even hint at the identity of those designated as medieval. Since the story of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker has a Christmas setting, I suppose that three dances from it qualify, though I am not sure why the famous chorale "Sleepers, wake!" from Bach's 140th cantata does.