The holidays are a time to reminisce about childhood, focus on family and friends, and find the essence of these important days yet again. The California Bach Society will start your journey to the festive days of yesteryear with its upcoming concert, A Belén (To Bethlehem).
Cal Bach and its artistic director, Paul Flight, have earned a reputation for unusual and interesting repertoire. This diligence to unique music is especially important during the holiday season. Their holiday program is “quite novel,” Flight promises. The chorus will bring to life 16th- and 17th-century Spain through the powerful villancico. That holiday celebration focuses on lively and exuberant carols, which are far from traditional and are seldom heard outside Latin America and Europe. Flight says he’s delighted to bring this rarely explored body of repertoire to the Bay Area.
He took great care in preparing both the musicians and the audience for this musical fest, through extensive research. Villancicos, he says, were songs for the people, bringing festivity to daily life for over a hundred years before reaching religious services. The transformation of these popular works into Christmas carols was drawn from a motivation to connect meaningfully with the faithful. Through that transformation, the faithful felt bolstered in their spiritual connections through witnessing extraordinary masterworks of polyphony and rhythmic vitality, while learning the stories of the Church through characters they could relate to.
Bay Area audiences will be bolstered, as well, this holiday season through these powerful works. The villancico movement was strengthened through the church’s desire to strengthen its relationship with its followers. Villancicos’ boisterous songs exploded with emotion that reached as far as the New World, embodying elements of central European beliefs melded with indigenous customs. The evolution of these works mirrors that of a faithful people around the globe during holiday time.
Audiences will not be disappointed this holiday season with the lively and humorous A Belén. The program includes a double choir, beautiful scoring, and both moving and incredible stories, including a bullfight with Christ. As Paul Flight eloquently explains, villancicos are a “repertoire of hidden gems.”