Christmas Eve • December 24, 2019 • 4:30 pm in the Sanctuary
What excitement it is to write the personalized arrangements for our Christmas Eve service! Our congregation can look forward to an exciting service. I pray my musical choices and arrangements will rise to the occasion that the choir, our decorations, the sermons and readings, and our congregants will expect.
We will have RSO harpist Nanette Felix, Baltimore Symphony clarinetist Melissa Lander, and a wonderful string quartet with us (led, as in the past five years, by the ever-talented Matthew Cataldi), in addition to the inimitable and amazing Valerie Blair and our Sanctuary Choir.
Among the music you will hear will be John Rutter’s What Sweeter Music, a wild version of Gaudete (complete with a hidden twelve-tone row to prickle up our ears) to balance out the Rutter, a lush setting of the famous poem All this Night My Heart Rejoices, and other beautiful works. To me, the point is never the music, but rather the extent to which our music can help to support ministry–the result should assist us in feeling the impact of the readings of the service: the Word of God.
Please invite your friends, your neighbors, people you may not associate with normally, and even yourself to this special Christmas service. Candlelight, carols, prayer, and Christ.
Yours,
Paul Laprade, Music Minister