MUSIC
Holiday music
By Jeffrey Levine; photos by kc kratt

The Buffalo Gay Men’s Chorus.
There are many holiday musical traditions just as inexorable as hanging mistletoe, watching It’s a Wonderful Life, and going out for Chinese food. While this nostalgic steadfastness often leads to productions of the great masterworks, such as the Buffalo Philharmonic and BPO Chorus performing Handel’s Messiah at Our Lady of Victory Basilica (Dec. 7), it also leads to repetition, repetition, and yet more repetition.

“When you hear ‘Silent Night’ 4,000 times every December you just can’t get away from it,” Roland Martin, conductor, composer, and artistic director of the Freudig Singers, admits. “When ‘Silent Night’ is played everywhere, it develops a generic sound; it doesn’t sound the least bit Austrian. But when you hear it in the original, there’s no doubt.”

Embracing the idea of an international Christmas, the Freudig Singers aim to offer one of the more all-encompassing (and edible) performances of the season with “Christmas Carols and Tasty Pies from Around the World” on December 5 at the Westminster Presbyterian Church and December 7 at the Orchard Park Presbyterian Church.

“What we’re trying to do is look at carols and the development of our own American tradition and how we’ve come from so many different countries,” Elizabeth Sands, chairwoman of the Freudig Singer’s board of directors, explains. “We wanted to look at the tradition from around the world and bring that richness to the Western New York community. We wanted to give the audience a flavor of an international Christmas.”

All things considered, flavors is certainly the most appropriate description for a concert that is as innovative for its postconcert reception—a bevy of pies donated by Murphy’s Main Street Station—as for its programming. There are carols from Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Ireland, Germany, early eighteenth-century Mexico, and an original song composed by Martin—it is not often that a melody by Sibelius is sung in the same program alongside Appalachian folk tunes. Adding another note to the palette, the Freudig Singers will be joined by the Buffalo Seminary Glee Club as well as the OPMS Select Choir & Drumming Ensemble.

Even though the singers are sharing Christmas music in a church setting, the group itself has no religious affiliation.

The Freudig Singers.

“It feels enormously right for us to be performing this concert,” Sands says. “We have people who are Christian, Jewish, or who aren’t part of an organized religion at all. But when we get together it feels right to be performing the works we are in the spaces we are. We do a lot of singing in sacred spaces and our music is reflective of that.” As she points out, “Sacred spaces were made for celebration.”

While the Freudig Singers are embracing the rich tradition of the carol, the Buffalo Gay Men’s Choir has elected to try to encompass the spirit of the season. Taking a more nondenominational approach, audiences will have three chances to see the BGMC’s “Hope for the Holiday” concert series: on December 12, 13, and 14 at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Buffalo, Trinity Episcopal Church, and Hamburg Methodist United Church, respectively.

“There is a spirituality to the group and I talk to [the members] a lot about the text and how it fits with the music and fits with who we are,” says Barbara Wagner, artistic director of the Buffalo Gay Men’s Chorus. “Anyone can sing some of the stuff and it’s fine and wonderful. But for us to sing some of these things is a miracle. We sing about love, and it can be any kind of love. You can always turn it around. Why not make it about two gay men falling in love? You never know whose heart you might touch or whose life you might save.”

For an ensemble that has been forced to temper some adversity as well as encouragement and support (from the larger part of the WNY community), love seems like the only appropriate answer. Presenting a spectrum of love that runs from Holst’s solemn processional “In the Bleak Midwinter” and Dolly Parton’s sorrow-filled “Hard Candy Christmas” to the tenderness of the Italian lullaby “Bel Bambino” and the flirtatiousness of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” the entire season is perhaps best enumerated not by an entire concert, but rather, a single song.

“‘Finally Here’ has nothing to do with Christmas, but then again it has everything to do with it,” Wagner notes. “It’s a song about how it’s okay to hold hands in public or run your fingers through your partner’s hair. Call it our gift to everyone.”

Despite several semesters of voice lessons, Jeffrey Levine prefers to confine his singing to car trips and the occasional karaoke night.


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