The holiday season is a busy time for SGC families. It's a busy time of year anyway, and when you throw in multiple concerts and extra rehearsals it can quickly get overwhelming. No matter how busy you are, I would like to encourage you to come hear one of the two Carmina Angelorum concerts put on by Prime Voci and Cantamus (December 6 in Magnolia, December 14 in West Seattle).

A small fraction of what theses choirs have learned will be sung when we have our annual all-choir concert at Town Hall Seattle. But the Carmina Angelorum concerts are different. Special. The kind of event you can build a holiday tradition around, and that will inspire your love of music.

These concerts got their start out of a conversation I had with harpist Juliet Stratton, a longtime collaborator with SGC. We were working on a few pieces from Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols, and I remarked to her about how extraordinarily beautiful the girls sounded with the harp, and asked if she knew of any other works for harp and treble voices. She had just recently played a new piece by a composer named James Bingham that was modeled after the Britten... A year later we gave the first Carmina Angelorum concert featuring the Britten, Bingham's Procession & Carols, and John Rutter's Dancing Day (from which comes the perennial favorite "Personent hodie"). That initial offering was so successful we recorded it a few months later in the breathtaking acoustics of Holy Rosary Church in West Seattle.

This year we are returning to our roots by presenting the Bingham again for the first time since we recorded it. This challenging work consists, like Britten's, of Medieval Christmas texts set to rich, complex, challenging yet still accessible and beautiful harmonies.

The Carmina Angelorum concerts are one of the things I am most proud of in my life, musically. Please, come experience this wonderful event for yourself... You will not regret it!