DESCRIPTION:
Quire sang Walford Davies' lovely setting of "The holly and the ivy" in our second and third Christmas programs, and it appears on our second Carols CD, so it has long been a Quire favorite. I was aware that Davies was arranging the piece but was never quite sure what he was arranging it from. What I found was that one of the earliest musical versions of the lyric seems to be in the Herefordshire folk tradition, so I simply took that song and provided a harmonization that attempts to be true to the spirit of the piece. The soloists are Donna Fagerhaug and Brian MacGilvray, and the performance is from "Carols for Quire 5," at Trinity Cathedral, Cleveland, OH, December 20-22, 2013.