Christmas carols

Friday evening, I went to the annual concert of Christmas carols at Maryknoll. They have a very nice “chapel” (more like a cathedral), and it was a nice choir concert (with some audience participation). A few small personal notes:

• “Adeste Fideles” / “O Come All Ye Faithful”:
  

  Venite adoremus, venite adoremus,
  Venite adoremus, Dominum!

  They sung it in English; I like it much more in Latin.
• From “The Holly She Bears a Berry”:

  Now the holly bears a berry as green as the grass
  And Mary bore Jesus, who died on the cross

  In England, it rhymes. Not here.
• “Silent Night”:
  It would have been nice to see them do it as a bilingual or trilingual number, “Silent Night”, “Stille Nacht”, and “Noche de Paz”. But they did it as a sing-along, and it’s funny: when you end each verse in tempo rubato, the audience can’t figure out when to start the next verse.
• I don’t think I’ve ever heard “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” on organ before.
• Every time I hear that stupid partridge song, it only gets worse, and seems more interminable.
• There was a guy near me with a camera, taking a few photos. His flash went off the first couple of times, leaving him with pictures of a few glowing, bald heads in the foreground, with the choir in the underexposed dark. I got his attention, and suggested that he’d get better pictures if he turned the flash off. He nodded and tried that, then showed me a very nice picture of the choir, the pates in the foreground barely noticeable.