Further North in Wintertime – Asides (XXII)

 

Was my favourite Christmas carol about to be given the Bob Dylan treatment, rendered unrecognisable through a strange, impenetrable arrangement? The first few bars didn’t sound at all like the more familiar renditions of Christina Rossetti’s beautifully desolate ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’, and I scrunched up my nose in annoyance. But then, the opening dissonances allowed room for the more familiar thread of Gustav Holst’s original melody, not quite on the nose though, and introducing a slight weariness – as if you were actually struggling to trudge through three feet deep snow – and I was hooked.  

Edvard Munch, Winter in the Woods (1899) 

Sublime harmonies weaved their way around the medieval nave of St Bartholomew the Great at the Livery Companies Carol Service. The candles flickered, the shadows sensed ghosts, and – even though the temperature outside had been coaxing impotent song from the throats of foolish birds - it finally felt like winter.

This morning, I looked up this arrangement by the Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo and was in turn thrilled to stumble upon a rendition of it by the acapella octet Voces8. Listening three times in a row, feeling my mood lift as those ethereal high notes rise towards the end, I might find it something of a struggle to return to the English setting of the carol. The Scandinavians certainly know their snow.