GUILFORD — Friends of Music at Guilford's 43rd Christmas at Christ Church event is set for Friday Dec. 11, at 8 p.m., and Saturday, Dec. 12, at 4 p.m. These annual gatherings include both choral and instrumental Christmas music, a story, and a short carol-sing.
This year's program includes an eclectic selection of songs, both sacred and secular, to bring in the holidays. Under the direction of Tom Baehr, the Guilford Chamber Singers present perennial favorites such as “Carol of the Bells” and “Deck the Halls” with much earlier carols from the 14th to the 18th centuries. To these are added contemporary pieces “Bethlehem Spiritual” and “The Winter's Night.”
There is a setting of “Winter Wonderland” and even an arrangement of “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy” from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker.
“Come, Dear Children” by Alfred Burt is an invitation to participate in the season's festivities.
The current Guilford Chamber Singers are Tom Baehr, director; Janis Chaillou and Sarah Lott, sopranos; Jeanne Austin, Beth McKinney, and Joy Wallens-Penford, altos; Paul Cooper, Bill Johnson, and Peter Tracy, tenors; and Peter Abell and Peter Nadolny, basses. Most have been singing with this group for at least a few seasons and also perform with church choirs and other choruses in the region.
A Bolivian Baroque carol on the program, “Al Portal Llegaron,” includes instrumental accompaniment and leads to some more Bolivian carols performed by the Guilford Chamber Players under the direction of Amy Cann. This Bolivian material is from a collection of modern-day manuscripts prepared from Baroque-era originals and only recently made available.
Friends of Music acquired some of this Bolivian Baroque archive directly from the Polish priest who has spent the past 30 years gathering, protecting, and republishing it for a new generation of performers in Bolivia and around the world.
Other segments of the collection will be introduced at a chamber music event in February and at the annual Memorial Day Weekend organ concert in May, when Fr. Nawrot is planning to speak in person about his musical reclamation project.
Following the music, Don McLean introduces a new dramatic reading by an award-winning short story writer. “The Christmas Lie” was set in Canada's Alberta wilderness by Dorothy Thomas (1898-1990), who lived there for seven years as a child. At age 30, she sold her first story and soon was being published in major national magazines, including H.L. Mencken's The American Mercury, The New Yorker, and Ladies Home Journal.
This tale, originally titled “The Christmas Whopper” by Thomas, appeared in The Saturday Evening Post in December 1957.
To close the evening, the audience is invited to sing a few familiar carols, finishing with “Silent Night “as the church bell is rung in the tower and echoes across the village.
Door donations are shared with historic Christ Church, which was the first Episcopal church in Vermont but has not had a resident congregation since the early 1900s. Christ Church is at the corner of Route 5 and Melendy Hill Road, a bit over a mile south of Exit 1 off Interstate 91.