What a perfect way to launch the winter, than with Anne Janelle and James Hill, and their moonlit Christmas album ‘The Midnight Clear,’ performing live with the Symphony of the Kootenays.
The Nova Scotia-based folk duo’s scintillating and unique group sound — on ukulele and cello — brings folk traditions into a contemporary atmosphere via a classical path. They are known globally for their original music steeped in ancient traditions, for their reinterpretation of familiar carols, and songs celebrating the winter.
They are touring Canada at present, showcasing ‘The Midnight Clear,’ released last year to great acclaim.
Hill and Janelle are touching down in Cranbrook on Nov. 30, taking the stage at the Key City Theatre to perform with the Symphony.
The 15 songs on ‘The Midnight Clear’ place the original side by side with tradition, which gives the music on album an organic, living quality. The longstanding traditions of Christmas are fresh and relevant once again.
“Christmas is a time of hope,” Hill said, in an interview just prior to setting out on tour. “That’s one of the key feelings of the season. I think hope is very closely tied to change — I don’t think many people sit around hoping that things will stay exactly the way they are. When people think of hope, they think of a better future, they long for some kind of change.
“To embody that in the music is to show that the songs themselves can change, and at the same time carry the same messages. But they are malleable. And that hope for the future means an acceptance of change. I hope that we’ve infused some of that message into the album itself.”
Christmas music itself — centuries of tradition, of beautiful melody, and powerful messages and storytelling — comes back into our lives every year at the start of the winter, and serves as backdrop to our lives throughout the season.
Hill says ‘The Midnight Clear’ was the first album he’s ever been part of that makes “really good background music.
“And I’m happy about that. There’s something about Christmas music that you want it to wrap around people while they’re opening presents, cooking dinner, eating dinner. You don’t want it to be elevator music, but you want it to be part of the scenery.
“That’s an interesting artistic challenge, because you also want it to be interesting. So how to you do that? It’s like making really beautiful wallpaper, and I think we achieved that.”
At the same time, Christmas music is beautiful and powerful, and calls for reflection and celebration — even if it feels Christmas isn’t high on our list anymore.
“We live in an era where there’s this elephant in the room,” Hill said. “To what extent are we allowed to celebrate Christmas, now with our understanding of different cultures, those cultures represented in our country — perhaps our neighbours don’t celebrate Christmas. We might have doubts about our own faith, our own spirituality. This is the backdrop against which we now hear all this Christmas music.”
At the same time, the music itself transcends this noise, this confusion.
“On ‘The Midnight Clear,’ we’re not offering any answers to that confusion,” Hill said. “But we are putting tradition up against new compositions, to juxtapose them and to say that regardless of whatever chaos or confusion there might be in our hearts or in the world, there’s still a lot of beauty there. I think that’s the main message of the album.”
This is the music Hill and Janelle will be playing with the Symphony of the Kootenays in Cranbrook on Saturday, Nov. 30. The complex beauty of “The Midnight Clear’ album backed by the power of the Symphony. There are arrangements for symphonic ensemble, and in fact, the album has been performed with a symphony before — three times with the Okanagan Symphony Orchestra last year at the album’s launch. That was the first voyage of the album, Hill says. Jeff Faragher, who is also Artistic and Music Director with the Symphony of the Kootenays, was conducting then too.
Visually, and appropriately, the moon features prominently in the album’s artwork, and could well serve as a metaphor for the music on ‘The Midnight Clear.’ Tradition is always the same, and yet always different, as it adopts to modernity and stays relevant. Like the moon, which follows an always changing, yet mathematically consistent path. The moon is always highest in the sky in winter, as well.
“There’s something special about the moon being the light in the darkness and always changing, no matter what,” Hill said. “The image of the moonrise that relates to ‘The Midnight Clear’ encapsulates all the things we’re trying to accomplish on the album."
Saturday, Nov. 30, is the last day before the new moon — so Janelle, Hill and the Symphony of the Kootenays will be supplying all the moonlight for the evening.
The Symphony program on Saturday also includes a performance of Mozart’s Concerto No. 13 in C. This is a revival of the Symphony of the Kootenays’ student piano concerto, with three piano students — Dallevan Lapaire, Jonathan Talbot and Grace Vandermolen, each taking one of the concerto’s three movements.
