Rose Ever Blooming (album)

A 55-minute Christmas oratorio featuring SATB choir, violin solo, and orchestra.

Rose Ever Blooming honors the role of Mary in the Christmas story, highlighting the importance of family and the eternally strong bonds between mother and son. The libretto is inspired by Patricia Monaghan’s poetry, featuring twelve poems woven together with traditional Christmas carols as musical touchstones, supporting the themes and narratives in Monaghan’s poetry.

Every divine moment of the Christmas story is presented here with a human counterpart. In Rose Ever Blooming, we see Mary’s story from the onset of motherhood as a metamorphosis from an ordinary girl to one who will “bring forth the future,” and recognizes the divine within all of us. It is refreshing to hear Mary’s story through her eyes, and Monaghan’s brilliant portrayal of her character shines through in these sensitive and poignant poems.

Learn more about the oratorio and its future publication here on Graphite.

Hagen and Takach’s creation isn’t one-dimensional: there’s joy, yes, but also solemnity and even moments of quiet despair and desolation (see “A Stranger Tells Us the News” and its line “For the first time, I hated the angel”). Even so, melancholy is offset by the radiance of “Magnificat” (“I am earth, I am stars, I incarnate god”), poetic tenderness of “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” (“From sin and death He saves us, And lightens every load”), and moving uplift of “Beatitudes” (“Blessed are you, child of sun and rain, embraced by and embracing this world”). Concluding the work effectively is the instrumental “Woman Clothed With the Sun,” which revisits material from the work’s opening movement to ease the listener out on a peaceful and spiritually satisfied note. Needless to say, music of such harmonious uplift is a magnificent tonic for times as tumultuous as ours.

-Ron Schepper, Textura