Piffaro's German holiday concert

'Tis the season for concerts that end with sing-alongs. Last week, the Christmas program presented by Choral Arts Philadelphia ended with Matthew Glandorf leading his audience through two choral masterpieces: Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus and Handel's Zadok the Priest. For Piffaro's Christmas sing-along, the merry pipers of Philadelphia's Renaissance wind band stuck with two pieces that almost everyone knows, but they integrated the audience participation into the main program and recreated a German liturgical practice called Wechselgesang.

Wechselgesang means "exchange song." In German Protestant churches, each verse of the hymn would be sung by a different group— the clergy, say, or the choir or the congregation. The practice added variety to long hymns that had to be sung in their entirety so the congregation could receive the full message embodied in the text.

Piffaro ended the first half of its Christmas concert with the stately rhythms of Von Himmel Hoch, sung in German, with seven settings that alternated solos by the soprano Laura Heimes, six verses sung by the audience, and instrumental versions that exploited the tone colors created by different combinations of instruments.

In the second half, the livelier tempos of In Dulci Jubilo received the same treatment, with Piffaro's Renaissance bagpipes adding their inimitable presence to the instrumental mix.

Austere program

In the past, Piffaro has sometimes presented elaborate Christmas programs that included strings, actors, extra voices and a story line, such as the conflict between the rival spirits of the masculine Holly and the feminine Ivy. Saturday's concert was one of Piffaro's more austere holiday programs, with Grant Herreid's lute and guitar providing the only instrumental alternatives to the band's core wind ensemble.

On the other hand, the program continued Piffaro's season-long exploration of German Renaissance and Baroque music— a theme that taps into a musical tradition packed with Christmas melodies. The program included carols as well loved as Es ist ein Ros Entsprungen, along with unfamiliar works that nevertheless radiated the spirit of a tradition that gave us some of our most enduring Christmas customs.

Two specialists

Piffaro connected with Laura Heimes when she was still a student at Temple University, and she has remained a regular guest as she's matured into a well-traveled early music specialist. At this concert, I was struck by the way her voice blends with the Renaissance instruments— the result, presumably, of singing with them for two decades.

Grant Herreid contributed an expressive tenor to duets with Heimes. He's probably the most versatile regular in a band that's noted for its versatility. In addition to his work as Piffaro's lute and guitar specialist, Herreid plays most of the Renaissance wind instruments, and he designed some of the most elaborate programs Piffaro has presented over the past 30 years.

Back in Scrooge's day

On the night before the night before Christmas, I watched a local actor, Josh Hitchens, present a one-man Christmas Carol in a friend's West Philadelphia living room. Hitchens included excerpts from Dickens's own narration, which you don't get in most movie versions, and I was struck by the emphasis on food and the total absence of any mention of presents.

Feasting is the main event in Dickens's vision of Christmas. The only gift mentioned in the story is the huge turkey that Scrooge sends to Bob Cratchit's family when he achieves Dickens's version of moral redemption.

As far as I can tell from my own delvings into history, gift-giving preempted the center of the holiday stage some time late in the 19th Century. Until then, Christians celebrated Christmas the way we Americans celebrate Thanksgiving and New Year's— with feasting and partying. They didn't think of the season as a buildup to the climactic moment when we open our presents.

Musical gifts

To a large extent, that shift reflects the rising level of Western economic development. Big meals were still a luxury in Dickens's time, and the factories were still busy turning out necessities, not toys and adult baubles. Most inhabitants of London lived like the poor clerk Bob Cratchit, not like the portly businessmen portrayed in the illustrations for Dickens's Pickwick Papers.

But that emphasis on enjoyable experience is one of the gifts that our early music groups can offer contemporary Americans, even if they can't precisely reproduce the Christmas festivals of the pre-industrial age. They can turn our attention to communal artistic pleasure and offer a respite from the gift-giving ritual that has usurped our winter revels.