Time for some Christmas music

Enough politics (for now). No more Juno dog blogs (until the new year). It’s time for some Christmas music, in particular, The 2024 St. Olaf Christmas Festival, “Our Hope for Years to Come.” A compilation of this year’s three performances is now available for on-demand viewing throughout the holiday season here.

A tradition since 1912, the St. Olaf Christmas Festival is one of the oldest musical celebrations of Christmas in the U.S., led this year by five conductors and featuring more than 500 student musicians. All choristers singing from memory!

For a teaser watch their spirited rendition of G F Handel’s Lift Up Your Heads (Messiah, HWV 56). The full 90-minute presentation showcases recordings from three live performances of this year’s Christmas Festival recorded earlier in December. Detailed program notes can be accessed here.

In his opening comments, Anton Armstrong, artistic director of the annual Christmas Festival introduced the theme for this year’s festival: Our Hope for Years to Come. He noted that when he and his colleagues began early in the year to plan this year’s festival they did not know where the world would be come December. He described escalating conflict in the Middle East, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and divisions in the US. “But this season always reminds us of the possibilities for the future, that peace, goodwill to all, might actually find a place in our world.” Amen to that; hence the timely theme:

O God our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come;
Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home.
—Isaac Watts, 1709 (Based on Psalm 90)

Such a hopeful and faithful attitude well expresses the educational tradition and pedagogical strategy of St. Olaf College. Founded in 1874 by Norwegian Lutheran immigrants, St. Olaf is a nationally ranked liberal arts college of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (LCA) located in Northfield, Minnesota. A St. Olaf education prepares graduates to live on purpose for the common good. St. Olaf’s inclusiveness for the time — welcoming women, immigrants, and farmers — paired with an exploration of vocation that is about responding to God’s call in all aspects of life provides an excellent foundation for vocational development and social engagement.

During the summer of 1996 I attended a church music conference at St. Olaf where I caught some of the vision, energy, and amazingly high musical and academic standards of this US midwestern, Lutheran college. Hearing this festive music now brings back wonderful memories of what well supported (and let’s face it, well healed—St. Olaf is a private college after all) undergraduate musicians can accomplish given the right resources and encouragement. The results of this year’s preparations are frankly, spectacular. And yes, the music does indeed bring hope to a very complex and concerning global context.

Enjoy the music. Politics can wait, for now.