As we sing tonight, the low winter sun sets early.  To the north, beneath the handle of the Little Dipper and riding the back of Taurus, shine the Pleiades, dozens of tiny gems surrounding the Seven Sisters.  This brilliant cluster, pictured on our cover courtesy of a telescopic photograph,  can still be viewed by eye wherever the screen of electric light has not smeared night's vivid darkness.  In this season of natural darkness, human imagination and faith create festivals of light, such as Hanukkah -- a feast of miraculously burning oil lamps -- and Christmas, which anticipates both the return of the sun and the birth of a son.  Like stargazing, so also poetry and music still conjure this sense of anticipation and hope.  Tonight, Cantabile presents music and texts to evoke winter's dark and celebrate festivals of light.

Around 1680, in a papal protectorate near Avignon that paid duties to King Louis but remained a haven of tolerance outside the rule of France, a prosperous Jewish merchant, anticipating the birth of a son, commissioned a cantata (Canticum Hebraicum) for the circumcision ceremony.  In his pride (or was this the composer's idea?) he chose a text praising the Almighty ('Nismecha yachad Eloheino echad eil chai olamim) and calling for the swift coming of the Tishbite [that is, Messiah] ('Shelach Tishbi maheir vehavi bizchut beritecha le'am amusecha.)  Little is known of composer Louis Saladin.  The scholarship of Israel Adler and Joshua Jacobson have resulted in a modern edition of this cantata, which is musically typical of the early French Baroque with its 'swing' triplet rhythms.  A full scoring would have strings, winds, and percussion for the dance-like sections.

At the same time, the Restoration in England fostered more elaborate anthems, imitating the splendor of the French court with ever larger instrumental forces.  Henry Purcell's Christmas Anthem for the Chapel Royal (1687) was thus essentially a cantata exploiting the spectacular low voice of a celebrated 'base', the Rev. John Gostling.

Praise Wet Snow Falling Early, like the Christmas Anthem, is a Gloria ('Praise the Lord'):  the second movement of a complete Mass celebrating the Day of St. Thomas Didymus ('doubting Thomas').  This is praise with a sharp purpose, reminding us that peace is no free gift, but a struggle against bloody impulse.  Poet, editor, and critic  Denise Levertov, born in England, became an American citizen in 1956.  Raised as Anglican, she undertook to write a Mass as a way to explore a text that had inspired music and poetry for centuries.  As quoted by Kathleen Norris in Christian Century (Feb 17 1999), Levertov wrote that "writing this Mass -- the long swim through waters of unknown depth -- had also been a conversion process" toward Catholicism.  Composer Elizabeth Alexander earned her doctorate in composition at Cornell in 1990. Her  compositions have been performed by over a hundred American choirs ranging from the American Master Chorale and the Gregg Smith Singers to elementary school choirs.  She has set texts by Sandburg, e. e. cummings, and others.  "Praise Wet Snow" won Highest Honors at the 2002 Oregon Bach Festival's "Waging Peace through Singing" project.

All This Night begins with the shrill  'wake-up' call of a rooster, chanticler, singer of light.  The Sun dispels dark and rescues the soul from darkness, as mortals gaze in awe and hail the Sun of Righteousness.  This holy pun was committed by William Austin, a London barrister of the early 1600s, who turned from writing popular humorous verse in his youth to producing a series of devotional poems for the great church festivals.  His posthumous book Haec Homo espoused the equality of women with men, declaring women to be the perfection of God's creation.  Composer Gerald Finzi was deemed by Ralph Vaughan Williams to be his successor, but he died at age 55, in 1956.  Finzi set many poems of Thomas Hardy, produced a setting of Wordsworth's Intimations of Mortality that is considered to be his masterpiece, and, with his wife, edited the works of poet and composer Ivor Gurney.

John Tavener calls for "extreme tenderness -- flexible-- always guided by the words" in performing his setting of the best-known of William Blake's Songs of Innocence, The Lamb.  Yet the musical structure is rigorously symmetrical in time and in pitch.  It is as if the freehand artistry of an engraver  were reproduced fourfold mirrorwise on the page, so deftly that the symmetry itself disappeared.  Blake's poems have inspired many composers -- Cantabile performed most recently two premieres of madrigal settings by American composer David Avshalomov.  Tavener arrived on the British musical scene in 1968 with his composition The Whale, for orchestra and pre-recorded tape. He was soon invited by Benjamin Britten to create an opera.  Later he found renewed compositional inspiration in the music of the Orthodox Church, and produced the Akathist of Thanksgiving (1988) to celebrate the millennium of Russian Orthodoxy.  A vast public heard the "Song for Athene" (1998) at the funeral of Princess Diana.

The Frost settings come from Frostiana, a cycle commissioned by the Town of Amherst to commemorate the town's bicentennial (1955) and to honor the poet who taught for many years at Amherst College.  For the premiere, Composer Randall Thompson conducted the community Bicentennial Chorus, with his friend Frost in the audience.

Both men are strongly associated with New England.  Thompson began his teaching career at Wellesley and ended it at Harvard, after stints at Berkeley, Princeton and the Curtis Institute. Robert Frost is often considered the iconic New England poet, and some of his poems, such as Stopping by Woods, are so widely taught that they seem obvious or sentimental.  That reaction is of course unfair to an artist who emphasized that poetry is a creation of intellect as well as feeling.

"Stopping by Woods" appeared in 1923 in the collection  New Hampshire: a Poem with Grace Notes.  Each short stanza comes almost to rest, but not quite, as one verse line, lacking its rhyme, anticipates the next stanza.  The poem ends with a famous repetition -- or is this, too, an anticipation and a challenge?  Composer Thompson likewise uses simple means but avoids the obvious.  Hymn-like men's voices match tempo but not cadence with steadily falling snow, and each phrase detours for an extra measure before arriving at its goal.  “Come In” appeared twenty years later during wartime, as title poem of a collection.  Miles later, the woods, still dark, are no longer ‘lovely’, but a sad place where a thrush’s song is ‘almost like a call to come into the dark and lament.’  This time Frost’s choice is clear: “But no, I was out for stars.’  In Thompson’s setting, the piano’s trill accompanies women’s voices.

Last winter’s concert featured a premiere of  “Winter Madrigals” by Bruce Lazarus.  This year  Cantabile presents a newly commissioned work, A Guide to the Winter Sky.  Lazarus writes:

I've been fascinated by stars and galaxies as far back as I can remember. My youthful imagination was fed by a mixture of science fact and fiction: the early NASA program, "Lost in Space," my first good telescope, the Hayden Planetarium, "Star Trek," Arthur C. Clarke novels. To this day, I have a strong sense of connection to distant planets, stars, galaxies, and the universe - an ongoing spiritual experience.

My long-term romance with space has often sparked my music. My Alpha Centuri (2000) for harpsichord quartet and Ordinary Stars (2002) for solo piano were premiered at the Storm King Music Festival in Cornwall, New York, and last year I was privileged to compose a choral work for Rebecca Scott's Juilliard Pre-College Chamber Chorale - StarSongs - a 20-minute cantata on astronomical themes for youth chorus, flute, cello, and harp.  Guide to the Winter Sky, for SATB adult voices and piano, looks upward to the stars while keeping its musical feet planted firmly on Planet Earth, and was designed to be performed preferably on an evening when there's a layer of frost underfoot and a nip of winter chill in the air.

We begin in the manner of an astronomy handbook (or planetarium show) by pointing out a few easy-to-see features of the 9 p.m. winter sky ("Ursa Minor hangs from the North Star, and Ursa Major sits on its tail near the horizon."), progress to discussions of the mythologies behind a few constellations and star groupings (Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux, the Pleiades), describe the yearly shift of Cygnus's east-west orientation from an upside-down T-shaped winged Swan into an upright T-shaped Cross, and conclude with a meditation on space and time in general (".boundless space and time without end -- it never ends.").

We close with a series of graceful settings of folk carols.  Troc-a-Tron echoes the clip-clop of donkey’s hooves on the long journey to Bethlehem.  Czech composer, organist, and musicologist Petr Eben has produced many large-scale orchestral works, and like Tavener often turns to plainchant.  Here, he shows his love of old folk melody, in what has been called "styled archaism".  Settings of Donkey Plod and Mary Ride and How Soft, Upon the Ev'ning Air come from Thomas Dunhill and Eric Thiman, both known for accessible keyboard works, melodious songs and cantatas suitable for community and school choruses, in conservative early 20th century ‘typically English’ style.  A much more opulent flowering of the folk-song movement is the Fantasia on Christmas Carols by Ralph Vaughan Williams.  Describing a recent recording, reviewer Stephen Schwartz notes that despite its loose form, this is far from just a string of melodies -- it's the work of a considerable symphonist.  Finally, from John Rutter, editor of British carol and chorus editions, composer of the Requiem (1985) and Magnificat (1990), a colorful setting of The Twelve Days of Christmas.  May you all get the gift you most desire this holiday season.