PERFORMANCE NOTES

Alexander L’estrange’s guide to performing his new choral piece

THE MOST IMPORTANT thing here, as indeed in all choral music, is the clarity and communication of the text. The English language is abundant with consonant clusters and diphthongs which are to be revelled in, not shied away from. If we sing the words as closely as possible to how we would say them, they can be heard and understood. As choral singers and directors, we can too often become overly concerned with precisely where to place final consonants and pay so much attention to lengthening ‘pure’ vowels that the resulting sound, while beautiful, can be less meaningful or moving for the listener. To this end, initial consonants (for example, on ‘Love’) and closed ‘m’ and ‘n’s in words such as ‘came’ and ‘sign’ must be heard. I have a particular dislike of rolled ‘r’s in modern English choral music and of sounding the silent ‘t’ in ‘Christmas’, so try to refrain from these mannerisms when you perform the piece!

Decisions about where to breathe should also be governed by a desire to communicate the meaning of the words. For our demo recording, we chose to breathe with the commas in bar 5 (‘born’ and ‘God’), but you can decide what suits your performance best. Enjoy the octave leap at the start of the melody and pay attention to your tuning as you come down the scale. Dynamics are subtle but should be effective, particularly the crescendos into bars 6 and 15 and the piano beginning to verse 3.

We hope you’ll include ‘Love came down at Christmas’ in your carol service or concert. Do photocopy the music or download the PDF from classical-music.com and share! We’d love to hear/see your performances, so send any audio files or Youtube links to music@classicalmusic.com and we’ll put them on our website.