Pablo Casals is remembered primarily as one of the great cellists. But did you know he was also a composer?
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll hear selections from what must be Casals’ most ambitious piece, his Christmas oratorio “El Pessebre,” or “The Crib” (once commonly translated as “The Manger”).
The text, by Catalan poet Joan Alavedra, was conceived in response to questions posed by his five-year-old daughter, who asked him, as he was setting up his crèche, what each of the figures at the Nativity – including the animals – said.
The project provided something of an escape for both artists. The work was begun while they were under house arrest in 1943. The folk-like simplicity of the oratorio is disturbed only occasionally by intimations of a troubled world. Casals added a prayer for peace to the concluding “Gloria” and refused to allow the work to be performed in Franco’s Spain. Instead, it was given its premiere in Acapulco, Mexico, in 1960.
As long as you don’t go into it expecting Christmas music of the caliber of that written by Casals’ idol, Johann Sebastian Bach, the oratorio makes for a charming and disarming musical experience. Said Casals, “The figures in a crèche are folk figures. Why, they can’t sing twelve-tone music!”
Casals’ recording of the piece (highlights from which I first heard on a stethoscope-style pneumatic headset on a flight to Europe, back in the 1980s!), to my knowledge, has never been released on CD. Even so, this one, with Lawrence Foster conducting, is probably about as good as it’s going to get.
Ox me no more questions; mule find out soon enough! I hope you’ll join me for “Catalan Christmas,” selections from “El Pessebre,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
BONUS: Casals’ arrangement of a traditional Catalan carol, “The Song of the Birds.” It was he who popularized the carol internationally in a version for solo cello, which he would sometimes include on his recitals as an encore.
