Great Music at Christmas in Germany

The great thing about Christmas in Germany, besides the Christmas -Markets, is the music.  This year we heard different types of music; all of them were beautiful.  First, we went to Nuremberg for the annual concert of  traditional folk music.  A collection of  ensembles (singers and instrumentalists with guitars, brass instruments, a harp, and a zither) played separately and together.   At the end, all the groups played a song together, and the public joined in the singing. (Germans love to sing.)



There is a wonderful little group called the Melchior Franck Kreis that played in the beautiful little church in Dormitz (20 minutes west of Erlangen).  It was built in 1416 in the Gothic style, but was decorated in the baroque style in 1716.
The Melchior Franck Kreis is based in Coburg, north of Bamberg, but tours around Franconia playing renaissance and early baroque music, especially the works of Melchior Franck (the Kapellmeister in Coburg from 1602 until 1639).  The group plays church music on the instruments of that time, including the Zink (a wind instrument that sounds very close to a human voice).  It was one of the most important instruments of the 15th to 17th centuries.  But what I especially liked are the singers.  There were 7 at the concert that I was at: 4 men and 3 women.  They sang the relatively simple style of church music with each singer having his own part, and the combination of all seven voices resulted in some beautiful harmony.

Today, we went to the concert hall in Erlangen to hear the Bamberger Symphoniker (Bamberg Symphony Orchestra) play music by Bach, Händel, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and others. At the end, they played music that the public could sing along with. (Did I mention that Germans love to sing?)  It's great to have such a famous orchestra so close to Erlangen.  Bamberg is smaller than Erlangen, and it's unusual for a city of its size to have an internationally renowned symphony. I found out that, before World War II, the symphony was the German Philharmonic Orchestra in Prague.  In 1946, all Germans were kicked out of Czechoslovakia, so the musicians from Silesia (now in Poland), Karlsbad (now Czech Karlovy Vary) and Prague  fled to the beautiful little city of Bamberg, which had avoided being bombed terribly.  Prague's loss is Bamberg's gain.