The big story of the Christmas Pops this year was "Karolju" by Christopher Rouse. It's a little hard to explain what this work is. It's supposed to be Christmas music in the style of various old world traditions -- it's sung in Latin, Swedish, French, Czech and German, each section having a style inspired by traditional carols. We skipped the sections in Spanish, Italian and Russian, but rumor has it we may come back to it next year and do the whole thing. All the tempos are EXTREMELY fast and there are a lot of words in each language, and it's really quite difficult, both for notes and words, because of the speed. But that doesn't cover the whole deal. The words are actual words and phrases in the target language that are appropriate to the season, but taken together as language they do not represent a coherent thought. That is, they are plausible sounding gibberish. I sent the French text to a professional translator I happen to know, and she said, "I have never seen anything like this; it isn't French, but it looks like it would like to be. At first I thought, well, something from 500 years ago? But quickly I could see, having studied medieval French and being in the process of translating handwritten letters from as early as the 1500s right now, this must be something someone who liked the sound of French made up. Or possibly some terrible misprints got published."
In fact, the very name of the work, "Karolju", is not translatable because the composer made the word up. Christopher Rouse himself talks about Karolju in the extract below:
The end result of all this weirdness is really fun and very effective, and most of us really liked it a lot, although it's truly exhausting to learn and to perform. It seemed that the audience liked it, too.
The other story from the Christmas Pops was that Scott Holshouser's son, Sean, sang an absolutely lovely "What Child is This" with the orchestra. Scott, of course, is our much loved accompanist, the keyboard specialist of the Houston Symphony,
Otherwise it was pretty much a "normal" Pops -- Krajewski cracked jokes and did his "whippist" thing with "Sleigh Ride", and there was a juggler straight out of vaudeville who was hilarious. Good entertainment, good singing.