Hi David, what a great thread!
I have always liked classical Christmas (related) concerts and songs in particular, so I think it’s nice to have all these classical Christmas songs together in one place like this.
Btw, I really liked the “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” played by the flute orchestra, too.
The flute is one of my favourite instruments (after the cello, of course
). I usually don’t like several flutes playing together, because it sounds never quite even or clean, but they did a very good job there.
The following two are “Adventslieder” (Advent songs). They are sung during Advent time and while most people just refer to them as Christmas songs, there are differences in topics which is why the church still knows this distinction between Christmas and Advent songs.
(I’m not sure if that was interesting to anyone, I only know this because I attended a Catholic school.
)
I’m sorry that these are all in German, but I’m not familiar with English Christmas songs (and the ones that I know are most likely not Baroque or Classical).
The tunes are the same, after all.
The first one is called “Es kommt ein Schiff, geladen”. I can’t give a literal translation of the title, because it’s a somewhat “poetic title” (by that I mean it’s not grammatically correct). Roughly translated the first two lines mean something like “There comes a ship, fully laden.”
I hope you don’t mind that I won’t say more about the lyrics, they are very long and complicated to translate and personally I think there is not that much of an actual message to the song.
It’s very early Baroque, from about 1626 and the tune is from 1608, according to Wikipedia.
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofGU640JeUw[/youtube]
