Wedding Music

by Alex

My Scarily Erudite Beloved and I met in choir. Between the two of us, we have a total of over four decades of singing experience. Our guest list includes not only a choir’s worth of people — and I mean _real singers_ — a conductor, and an accompanist. So far, the only thing we’ve really spent time thinking about our wedding plans is what music we’ll have. I’m shooting for a full 40 minutes at least — a real concert’s worth of music.

But what will be sung? This question is complicated by the fact that a lot of choral music is about the false god of the Christians, and wouldn’t be appropriate for our wedding. For some things — Sicut Cervus, for instance — we can make exceptions, since they are basically covers of Hebrew psalms in the first place (and our singers all already know Sicut Cervus by heart). We are looking in to Eric Whitacre’s 5 Hebrew Love Songs (we’d cheat and have the piano rehearsal accompaniment playing instead of the string quartet) — except not the embarassing middle movement with the Israeli tambourine thang. The ‘Hinei Matov’ movement from the Chichester Psalms was also recommended to us, as was Pinkham’s Wedding Cantata, except that the SEB does not really take a shine to the wedding cantata. We thought about a movement from Palestrina’s setting of the Song of Songs like “Nigra Sum Sed Formosa,” but the SEB summarily vetoed it when I, mindful of the Becky Barnett character from Boogie Nights, agreed we could do it, but only if we listed it on the program as “Chocolate Love.”

Finally we both agreed that William Walton’s “Set Me As A Seal Upon Thy Heart” would be perfectly appropriate, and I suggested that she listen to the recording of Walton’s choral music “with the castle on it” which I thought was the best one. It turns out that there are two such recordings (which feature churches and colleges and not actually castles) — one with the Finzi Singers and one directed by Christopher Robinson. Then we got into a big debate over which recording was which, which came out on Chandos, etc. etc. Finally the debate was solved or, more accurately, brought to a sudden halt, when googling around on Amazon for the recordings let to the discovery of a DVD entitled “Lambchop’s Passover and Hannukah Surprise”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00006JDRE/ref=cm_bg_d_18/002-3949094-5952040?v=glance. Like a trainwreck, we were “horrified”:http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B00006JDRE.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg. And yet could not turn ourselves away. The difference between a train wreck and Lambchop’s Passover and Hannukah Surprise, however, is that 1) you can not next-day-air a trainwreck to your door and 2) I have never seen a 5 star review of a train wreck before.

The upshot of this is that the Walton is probably on for the wedding, regardless of which recorded version each of us prefers. As for the rest of the program, well, we’ll just have to finalize it _after_ our DVD arrives to make sure there isn’t a hilarious sock-puppet based number we want to incorporate into our nuptials.

*Update:* You must all read “Katie Rains Amazon Review”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3NI7FDALIDFT4/ref=cm_aya_rev_more/002-3949094-5952040?%5Fencoding=UTF8 of “Hannukah on Planet Matzah Ball”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-reviews/B0000VLA6W/ref=cm_cr_dp_2_1/002-3949094-5952040?%5Fencoding=UTF8&s=dvd: “The movie starts with aliens on planet Matzah who found out they were jewish and who begin to chant ‘we are jewish! we are jewish!’ like it was some crazy cult. Then out of space comes this menorah that falls into their spaceship….” It just gets better from there. Although to be fair another reviewer notes “The singing dreidyl is also annoying, but I can tolerate that part.”