As Christmas inches nearer, Christmas music becomes more vocal, undoing a year's worth of hibernation. Not just the cheery songs creating the soundtrack to your Christmas shopping, but carols with their echoes of the past. Yes, it's time to hark the herald in a royal city while watching the shepherds and their flocks who really would prefer to be away in a manger where three kings of Orient would be wishing them a merry Christmas.
Top of my Christmas playlist this year are two settings of Christina Rosetti's beautiful poem 'In the Bleak Midwinter'. Perhaps neither Gustav Holst's 1906 setting nor Harold Darke's early 20th-century take on this plainly spoken poem are the most upbeat yuletide songs, but somehow both settings stand strong in their heartfelt simplicity. No soaring descants or hammed up harmony here - though where would Christmas be without these? - but quiet musings on the birth of Jesus.And which other carols match so exactly the weather this Christmas? The moaning frosty wind has certainly made the midwinter seem bleak.
The best part of the carol surely lies in the final stanza, the last line. 'What can I give him?' asks the poet. (Or her? Or them? - the three most asked questions of the past month?) Rosetti's answer, made even more powerful by Darke's glorious reach up on the final word, is probably the best to the question: 'give my heart'.
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