There never was a good war or a bad peace. (Benjamin Franklin)
If you don’t see this on the box some time over December, it’s just not Christmas, is it?
Not that there seems to be much cheer around at the moment. The Koreans are taking a very blase attitude in general to the recent unpleasantness: they make jokes about it, tell me they’re not worried, and have Christmas decorations and toys in the shops much earlier than usual. Genuinely not bothered, or pretending not to be? We’ll see.
Anyway, I thank all of you who continue to read my words (mostly, it seems to me, for the James Brown and Mike Oldfield posts, strangely enough), but am saddened that one who used to comment on here regularly has seen fit not only to take me off their blogroll but also to delete a comment I made about this on one of their posts. To that person I say:
Look, I’m genuinely sorry I haven’t been around much this year, but life has genuinely intervened, and if you’re not prepared to stick around fothe duration, there ain’t a hell of a lot I can do about it, and I’m not about to lose any sleep either. (I’ve removed your site too, if you’re bothered.) So instead I’d like to remind you of what a great bunch the Seoul Motet Choir are, and share some of the music you probably can’t get outside this country, which is a shame, as it “consoles the internal mind reveling (sic) what the true mneaning of healing music is.” (I am indebted to Park Chee Yong’s notes and his conducting of these fine musicians.)
From their 2005 CD Merry Christmas, I give you their versions of Ecce Concipies and Omnes De Saba venient by J. Handl; two Bach settings of Nun komm der Heiden Heiland; and two choruses from Handel’s Messiah, ‘And the glory of the lord’ and ‘And he shall purify’, the latter two sung in Korean. These will be familiar to those of you who remember my failed blog of a couple of years back, ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’, but they’re so pure and affecting I felt like reposting them. More to come soon.
Seoul Motet Choir, Anthems For Advent
