 The Anthems of Charles Wood, Choir of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Stream O Thou the Central Orb |
- Master Ionarts just sang this piece with his boy choir at Evensong last Sunday, Charles Wood's classic O Thou the Central Orb, and he was singing the treble line around the house for a couple weeks. The text seems especially apt looking out at the nearly two feet of snow on the ground today: "O Thou the central orb of righteous love, pure beam of the most high, eternal light of this our wintry world, thy radiance bright awakes new joy in faith, hope soars above. Come, quickly come, and let Thy glory shine, gilding our darksome heaven with rays divine" (words by H. R. Bramley). [Priory Records]
- According to Christian Merlin, Matthias Goerne is a charming, urbane, apparently calm person, in spite of having insisted that an audience member at one of his recitals, who was taking a picture while Goerne sang, be ejected. "I was truly enraged," he told Merlin, "I would have broken his camera if I could have. In Italy, I had already been interrupted in the middle of a recital for the same reason. But my anger was also well played: my concentration never wavered." [Le Figaro]
- Everybody in the world, including Ionarts, is publishing Top 10 lists at this time of the year. Leave it to a certain publication to come up with the best one, yet again, Our Annual Year: The Top 10 Stories of the Last 4.5 Billion Years. [The Onion]
- Matthew Guerrieri buys a little electronic dreidel that plays the dreidel song while it spins, transplants a sound chip from a card he received into it, and ends up with a dreidel that plays Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. [Soho the Dog]
- Jeremy Eichler had a great Sunday feature last weekend about what digital recordings and downloading have done to the joy of music collecting. [Boston Globe]
- A devastating parody that lays bare some of the intellectual challenges to a literal interpretation of the Bible. Brilliant. [The Onion]
- Pianist Pascal Dumay, appointed just last summer to the post of director of the Conservatoire in Paris, has been suspended. The reason is that he has been charged by authorities with downloading pornographic images involving children as young as 7 to his computer. [Le Figaro]
The Wood anthem has a famous typo that has been set in stone unfortunately by each ensuing publication. You don't quote the entire text above. The line "transforming day to souls...." should actually be "CLAY". The lower case c and l were printed too closely together in an early 20th century edition which made it look like a "d". If you read the text, singing the word "day" makes absolutely no sense, whereas clay does. I've heard it sung too many times as it is (not one of my favorite anthems) and I'm surprised at how little knowledge there is about this mistake. Frederick Gore Ouseley's library at St. Michael's housed the Wood original that unfortunately was later lost. But, NOT before someone was able to confirm the mistake.
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