One of the truly great hidden treasures in Christmas music is Hugo Distler's otherworldly masterwork Die Weinachtsgeschichte, Op. 10 (The Christmas Story). Composed in 1933 for four-part chorus and soloists with no accompaniment, this work reinvents the Baroque form of the Christmas cantata, stripping the standard text and dramaturgy down to their essentials and setting it with a concise, mildly modern, transparently beautiful harmonic language and an efficient design. With its variations on Praetorius' hymn "Est ist ein ...
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One of the truly great hidden treasures in Christmas music is Hugo Distler's otherworldly masterwork Die Weinachtsgeschichte, Op. 10 (The Christmas Story). Composed in 1933 for four-part chorus and soloists with no accompaniment, this work reinvents the Baroque form of the Christmas cantata, stripping the standard text and dramaturgy down to their essentials and setting it with a concise, mildly modern, transparently beautiful harmonic language and an efficient design. With its variations on Praetorius' hymn "Est ist ein Ros entsprungen" acting as a kind of ritornello, Die Weinachtsgeschichte has a sound that evokes the snowy landscapes, the quiet and calm of a traditional Christmas in Germany, but is not in itself traditional. Recordings have been made of Distler's setting of "Est ist ein Ros entsprungen" as an individual item with some frequency, sometimes without acknowledging the composer or only identifying the piece as "Traditional." Recorded at least five times in the analog era, but never in...
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