Section I: The Many Moods of Christmas

Traditional Carols Arranged by Robert Shaw and Robert Russell Bennett

In 1963, two titans of American music joined forces to reimagine the world’s best-loved carols for full chorus and orchestra: Robert Shaw, the era’s most celebrated choral conductor, and Robert Russell Bennett, the Broadway orchestrator behind My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, and The Sound of Music. The result, The Many Moods of Christmas, became one of the best-selling Christmas albums of its era and remains a cornerstone of American choral literature more than sixty years later. Tonight we perform two of its four suites — carols that traveled to America from Austria, Germany, France, and England, filtered through Bennett’s lush orchestral imagination and Shaw’s exacting choral ear.

A brass quintet (trumpets, horn, trombone, and tuba) joins the Chorale for The Many Moods and sticks around to liven up the carol sing-along and additional pieces on the program.

Suite I

Good Christian Men, Rejoice — An English adaptation, by hymn translator John Mason Neale, of the fourteenth-century German carol “In dulci jubilo.” It’s one of the oldest tunes on tonight’s program — nearly 700 years old — and still sounds fresh. Listen for its joyful, dancing triple meter.

Silent Night — Written in 1818 by Joseph Mohr (words) and Franz Xaver Gruber (melody) in the Austrian village of Oberndorf, the story goes that it was composed for guitar because the church organ had failed. Less than a century later, it became the one carol both sides of the trenches knew by heart during the WWI Christmas Truce of 1914. Listen for the simplicity that has let it travel further than almost any song ever written.

Patapan — A Burgundian French carol published in 1720, its title imitates the sound of a child’s drum and fife. Listen for the crisp, percussive rhythms in the voices, mimicking those instruments centuries before a drumline ever existed.

Come, All Ye Faithful — Known in Latin as “Adeste Fideles,” with English words added by Frederick Oakeley in 1841. Listen for the moment the whole chorus opens up on “O come, let us adore Him” — it’s built for exactly the kind of swell a full chorus does best.

Suite III

What Child Is This? — William Chatterton Dix wrote the words in 1865 while recovering from a serious illness, setting them to “Greensleeves,” a much older English folk melody. Listen for its wistful, minor-key opening — more melancholy than most carols — before it turns bright on “This, this is Christ the King.”

Hark! The Herald Angels Sing — Charles Wesley’s 1739 hymn text, married in 1855 to a tune adapted from a Felix Mendelssohn cantata written to celebrate the invention of the printing press. Mendelssohn himself thought the tune wrong for sacred words — history disagreed. Listen for its brass-band triumph, built into the vocal lines themselves.

Bring a Torch, Jeanette, Isabella — A seventeenth-century French Provençal carol imagining two milkmaids racing barefoot through their village to see the newborn child, urging everyone to hush as they go. Listen for the light, dancing rhythm — and the repeated “hush, hush” you’ll hear pass between the voice parts.

Angels We Have Heard on High — The French carol “Les Anges dans nos campagnes” gives us the single most famous vocal moment of the evening: the tumbling, soaring “Glo–o–o–o–ria” melisma. Listen for it — it’s one of the great thrills of live choral singing, and always more exciting in person than on any recording.

Section II: A Community Sing-Along

“We’re All in the Mood for Good Cheer!” — An Audience Carol Sing-Along

This one isn’t a piece to listen to so much as an invitation. Midway through the concert, the Chorale hands the music over to you — song sheets provided, no rehearsal required — for a set of carols everyone already half-knows by heart. Community caroling is older than the concert hall itself; long before choirs performed for audiences, neighbors simply sang together, door to door and pew to pew. For a few minutes today, that’s exactly what we become: one room, one song, no performers and audience — just neighbors.

Section III: Seasonal Favorites

The Chorale Celebrates the Joy of the Season

If the first half of  today’s program is Christmas as it came to America from Europe, this half is Christmas as America wrote it. Nearly every song in this set was born in the mid-twentieth century, many from songwriters working in the great Tin Pan Alley and Broadway tradition, who gave the American Christmas its unmistakable sound — warm, nostalgic, unapologetically sentimental, and open enough for every family, of every background, to feel at home inside it. This year, alongside the season’s classics, we’re proud to also sing music of Hanukkah — because an “American Christmas,” done right, has always made room for more than one tradition at the family table.

A Winter Medley: Let It Snow! / Silver Bells / Winter Wonderland (arr. Gary D. Fry) — Three songs from three different decades, three different songwriting teams. “Let It Snow!” was written by Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne during a Hollywood heat wave in July 1945 — imagining snow to cool off. “Silver Bells” (Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, 1950) was originally titled “Tinkle Bells,” until someone pointed out the unfortunate slang and the title quickly changed. “Winter Wonderland” (1934) is credited to Felix Bernard and Richard B. Smith, reportedly inspired by a snow-covered park in Smith’s hometown of Honesdale, Pennsylvania. Listen for how seamlessly three unrelated hits become one medley.

Come, Light the Menorah (Traditional, arr. Jason N. Bauch) — A traditional song celebrating the lighting of the menorah across the eight nights of Hanukkah. Listen for its warm, call-and-response melody — a song built to be passed hand to hand, night to night, light to light.

Light the Legend (Michael Isaacson) — Part of Isaacson’s larger Hanukkah work *Aspects of a Great Miracle*, set to a lyric by Susan Nurenberg. Isaacson modeled its glittering, propulsive energy on “Carol of the Bells.” Listen for the fast, rhythmic patterns tossed between voice parts — built to feel like light catching light.

Hanukkah, The Festival of Lights (Jill Gallina) — A favorite of school and community choirs everywhere for its warm, folk-like melody. Listen for how naturally singable it is — more a shared story passed around the room than a performance piece.

Christmas Is the Warmest Time of the Year (arr. Hawley Ades) — Ades is worth knowing in his own right: for 38 years he was the chief arranger for Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians, the ensemble that essentially invented the modern American choral-pop sound heard on radio and television for decades. Waring himself liked to say that more people sang Ades’s arrangements than any other arranger’s in history. Listen for the lush, warm harmonies that are his signature.

The Christmas Song (arr. Roy Ringwald) — Mel Tormé and Bob Wells wrote this one in the middle of a Los Angeles heat wave, reportedly trying to trick themselves into feeling cooler by imagining winter. Ringwald, like Ades, was one of Fred Waring’s key arrangers. Listen for “chestnuts roasting on an open fire” — one of the most famous opening lines in American song, born from two writers trying to beat the heat.

Do You Hear What I Hear? (arr. Harry Simeone) — Written in October 1962 by husband-and-wife songwriters Noël Regney and Gloria Shayne during the Cuban Missile Crisis, as a hidden plea for peace. By the lyricist’s own account, the “star with a tail as big as a kite” was meant to evoke a missile as much as the Star of Bethlehem — neither writer could get through singing it themselves at the time, given how real the fear of war felt. Harry Simeone released the first recording that same winter. Listen for how much weight the word “peace” carries once you know what it was really written for.

Let There Be Peace on Earth (arr. Hawley Ades) — Written in 1955 by husband-and-wife songwriters Jill Jackson and Sy Miller, first sung by a group of teenagers deliberately brought together across religious, racial, and cultural lines at a retreat built around understanding. Listen for a melody that rises gently rather than dramatically — written as a shared prayer, not a performance.

Home for the Holidays (arr. Roy Ringwald) — Written in 1954 by Al Stillman and Robert Allen, later made famous by Perry Como’s 1959 recording — and the very song that lends today’s concert its title. Listen for where the whole evening’s idea finally lands: after carols crossing oceans and centuries, after Hanukkah lights beside Christmas ones, after a room full of neighbors singing together, the finale is simply about coming home — which is what an American Christmas, at its best, has always meant.