In those long and languorous hours of Christmas afternoon, when the turkey lies demolished and the Queen has said her piece, there’s little left to do but drink and snooze.
The children’s toys are all played out. Your parents’ bracing walk has left them drained. The hours you spent last night in wrapping, writing, basting, boiling, decorating and displaying were not in vain, for all are quite, quite sated. Here, then, are my recommendations for those lazy hours until supper: a mixture of music, poetry and interviews to enthral and delight while you digest the morning’s labours.
Begin with Liszt’s Weinachtsbaum, a suite of 12 pieces for the piano. It was written in 1873-74, revised in 1874-76, and first performed on Christmas Day 1881 for its dedicatee, Liszt’s granddaughter Daniela von Bülow. Several of the pieces, such as the second, third and fourth of the set, are based on Christmas carols. Others, especially the last three, are autobiographical, describing people, places and scenes from life. The music is typical of Liszt’s late period: it eschews virtuosity in favour of harmonic exploration, rhythmic variation and subtle dynamic gradation. The set was first recorded in 1951 by Alfred Brendel for SPA – incidentally, his debut recording – which performance has not yet been bettered.
Follow this with a selection from the Desert Island Discs archive, available on the Radio 4 website. One could spend days flicking through this quite exceptionally rich catalogue, but to save you that trouble I would recommend the following:
• Sir Oliver Millar (June 4, 1977)
• Lord Dacre of Glanton (August 21, 1988)
• AN Wilson (April 30, 1983)
• Lady Diana Cooper (March 24, 1969)
• Lord Annan (November 4, 1990)
Lords Dacre and Annan are particularly exquisite episodes, each being fascinating, witty and opinionated in discussion, as well as possessing fine musical taste.
Having had music and spoken word, it must now be time for some poetry. In this venture, YouTube is your friend. It would be impossible to catalogue the embarras du choix contained there, so often is it updated, but there are perennial favourites. TS Eliot reading The Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock never fails to delight, being both well recited and a fascinating study in mutating accents. To my mind the 20th century’s greatest voice belonged to Richard Burton. Though there are literally hundreds of examples from which to choose, the channel La Commedia dell’Arte has a superb playlist of him reading Donne, Coleridge, Thomases Dylan and Edward, Betjeman and Graves, among others. The perfect accompaniment to a mid-afternoon nap.
Back to music in time for a late tea, it being universally recognised that all meals take place two hours later on Christmas Day. The day would be incomplete without JS Bach, and the piece must, of course, be his Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248. Comparing recordings is one of my most cherished activities, not least because it is an excuse to expand an already overflowing collection. Favourites at the moment include those by Nikolaus Harnoncourt (2007), Philippe Herreweghe (2013) and, for sheer grandeur, Karl Richter (1965), but the beauty of a piece like this is the breadth of performances available, so take the time to find the one which suits best your mood. I find the best way to do this is to take a passage or movement you know well and compare three or four performances, taking the time to apply one’s critical faculties fully.
By this point, having surveyed multiple performances of Bach, it must be time for a strengthening cocktail, and I can think of no better accompaniment than the trumpet – and flugelhorn – of Miles Davis. Sketches of Spain is one of his most musically fascinating albums, being an experiment in the melding of genres, ensembles, harmonies and timbres. It is Davis at his most dazzlingly inventive, backed by a watertight band and the incomparable arrangements of Gil Evans (real name Ian Green – his nom de plume is an anagram of “Svengali”).
The album’s most famous track is their version of the Adagio from Joaquin Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez, originally for guitar and orchestra but here rescored for brass and tuned percussion. The chords slide around as though played by a polyphonic trombone, were such an instrument possible, while Davis’s horn floats overhead, here stabbing, there swooping. It is a performance remarkable both for the soloist’s virtuosity and the sympathy between the band and him; there seems at times to be no separation between their minds.
Finally, we return to the piano with one of my idols, Dinu Lipatti. Lipatti was a Romanian pianist who died of Hodgkin’s disease, aged 33, on December 2, 1950. On September 16 of that year he gave his final recital, in Besançon, a performance which was recorded and is commercially available. Lipatti was, by this time, desperately ill, suffering from a high fever and in constant agony. Despite these privations he gave a remarkable performance, by turns a masterclass in tenderness, rhythmic vitality, dynamic contrast and sheer technique. His programme of Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Chopin ends with Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, a fitting note on which to end our celebration of Christ’s Nativity.
David Oldroyd-Bolt is a writer and pianist
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