<\/p>\n
Saturday in Newark felt like the North Pole. Not only was it freezing cold, but NJPAC<\/a> served as a sort of Santa\u2019s Village for the day, serving up two festive classical Christmas extravaganzas.<\/p>\n The first was the New Jersey Symphony\u2019<\/a>s \u201cElf in Concert<\/a>.\u201d John Favreau\u2019s 2003 film is often cited as one of the best<\/a> recent Hollywood Christmas films. It spawned a Broadway musical, an animated NBC special and even a video game. John Debney\u2019s soundtrack is rarely cited as one of the film\u2019s main strengths (that honor usually is saved for Will Farrell\u2019s manic, man-child performance as the titular elf, Buddy).<\/p>\n But as heard on Saturday in NJPAC\u2019s Prudential Hall, the New Jersey Symphony\u2019s playing of Debney\u2019s score \u2014 under the baton of conductor Connor Gray Covington \u2014 made it clear how central orchestral music is to the movie\u2019s success. Debney\u2019s score is never daring or experimental, but it deftly balances the film\u2019s oddball mix of comedy, charm and holiday sentiment. He uses sleigh bells and choral music to gently evoke the Christmas season, but effectively pivots to more conventional comic underscoring to let Farrell\u2019s many silent antics shine. The music as he downs an entire two-liter bottle of Coke being a perfect example. Also key is how Debney lets certain bits stand alone, like when Buddy makes the elevator buttons of the Empire State Building light up like a Christmas tree.<\/p>\n It is worth noting that watching this movie on a big screen with a full audience of more than 1,700 people on Saturday was as much a part of the magic as live music. \u201cElf\u201d was made by New Line Cinema, which makes it a Warner Bros Movie. Just 24 hours before the NJPAC screening, Netflix announced it had a deal to acquire the iconic, century-old movie studio. Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos infamously said in an interview earlier this year<\/a>, \u201cfor movie theaters, for the communal experience\u2026 it\u2019s an outmoded idea.\u201d But to see the many fans who showed up in \u201cElf\u201d costumes and t-shirts and laughed, cheered and teared up with their fellow Garden State citizens on Saturday, it would seem like seeing classic movies on a big screen, surrounded by strangers \u2014 and with a live orchestra \u2014 is very much in-season.<\/p>\n Next door to \u201cElf,\u201d in NJPAC\u2019s smaller Victoria Theatre, a very different<\/a> musical Christmas concert took place later that day. The choral group, Chanticleer<\/a>, performed their \u201cA Chanticleer Christmas,\u201d featuring Christmas carols new and old.<\/p>\n They opened with a Gregorian chant from about 500 years ago, the twelve singers entering the stage two-by-two. Their newest piece was written this year, an elegant triptych of choral music by contemporary British composer, Joanna Marsh. It was called \u201cWinter\u2019s Garden,\u201d and each of the three passages ended with an unexpected vocal flourish. <\/p>\n They sang acapella versions of staples like \u201cO Come All Ye Faithful\u201d and a moving encore of \u201cSilent Night.\u201d But like at their Princeton concert last year, their medley of American spirituals was the real standout. They closed the concert with a stirring rendition of \u201cGo Tell it on the Mountain,\u201d a song so popular and widely heard that I long forgotten it had anything to do with Christmas. Hearing the rich, clear voices of Chanticleer sing about the annunciation, \u201cthat Jesus Christ was born,\u201d was a reminder of how simple songs can communicate so much, on so many levels. <\/p>\n Or as Will Ferrell\u2019s Buddy the Elf says, \u201csinging is just like talking, except it\u2019s louder, longer and you move your voice up and down.\u201d Chanticleer moves their voices up and down like nobody else.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nj.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Saturday in Newark felt like the North Pole. Not only was it freezing cold, but NJPAC served as a sort of Santa\u2019s Village for the day, serving up two festive classical Christmas extravaganzas. The first was the New Jersey Symphony\u2019s \u201cElf in Concert.\u201d John Favreau\u2019s 2003 film is often cited as one of the best […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2193919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193919","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2193919"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2193920,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2193919\/revisions\/2193920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2193919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2193919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2193919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}