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Tony Holt is married to Lynne Warfel-Holt, producer and host on MPR's classical music station. He teaches voice at St.Olaf college, and an early music class at Carleton college, in Northfield.
Holt received bachelor's and master's degrees from Oxford University. A singer since age 7, he was included as one of the choristers at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He has sung professionally in a Cathedral Choir and in the BBC Singers, and more recently was a founding member of the King's Singers, an internationally renowned, six-voice male vocal ensemble.
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The "Flavored" Lady
by the Tony Holt
December 2002
"Adam lay y-bounden, bounden in a bond,
Four thousand winter thought he not too long"
I've always loved that carol, though it was many years before I really appreciated the beautiful simplicity of the words:
"Ne had the apple taken been, the apple taken been,
Ne had never our Lady a-been Heaven's queen"
In the Festival of nine lessons and carols at King's College, if memory serves me, Boris Ord's arrangement of these words used to be the first choir carol. Although I sang for nearly twenty years with The Kings' Singers , to some people's surprise I never participated in that service from King's College. I was the "ring-in" in the group, or so I was once informed in Texas, the Oxford man in that Cambridge sextet. Yet despite this, I must be as familiar with that service as anyone who ever took part.
Carols have always been a part of my Christmas, as far back as I can remember. Apart from singing them round the family piano - my parents and brother all sang too - we also listened to them every year in the radio broadcast from King's. It was as familiar an event, and as indispensable to my parents, as the turkey, the crackers, and the Queen's (or King's) speech. Whatever was happening in my Aunt, Uncle ,and cousin-filled house, we had to reduce the excitement to a dull roar when the carol service came on the air. Early on, it was probably more of an annoyance to us youngsters if truth be told, but over the years I learned to appreciate its special quality, the familiar words and selection of music being part of the fabric of our Christmas Eve. I listened with awe-struck ears when I too had to quake in my shiny black chorister shoes as I faced the ordeal of the solo verse in "Once in Royal David's City". I listened with an arrogantly
critical ear when I was involved as a young bass singer in our Advent Carol service at Chichester Cathedral. And I listened with embarrassment whenever the carol "Gabriel's Message" came up, remembering my faux-pas in a small chapel in a windmill (no, really!), singing "most highly FLAVORED Lady". But mostly I simply listened with pleasure.
Of course there was a comforting familiarity in the words, the form of service, and that particular King's sound. But there's more to it than just that. I recall that at Oxford, the choir Director at Christ Church, Dr. Sydney Watson, used to impress upon us constantly the importance of the music being an integral part of the worship, rather than a concert in it. The same existed at Chichester , particularly in the Advent carol service, which was quite a dramatic procession from darkness to light. The same too holds true for the Christmas Festival at St. Olaf college, where I now teach. It's this quality, I'm sure, that makes the Festival of nine lessons and carols from King's College such a special part of Christmas for so many thousands of people. It is not a concert, though the music is splendidly prepared. It is a way of reminding ourselves once again of the true meaning of Christmas, so that as we draw toward the close of the ninth
lesson, we can be at one with the words: "..and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth".
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