“A Journey into Christmas” is the title of a special cd produced by Vox Aurea (the Golden Voice), a choir of young boys and girls from special classes of music in the city of Jyväskylä in Finland and Sanna Salminen, director of the choir. The album features traditional music and ancient cultures, among the original languages, Finnish and English. A real journey into the Christmas tradition of Finnish, French, German, going to South Africa, Congo and last but not least Italy.
How many of you have ever heard “Quanno nascette ninno”? The choir Vox Aurea interprets this highly original song in three versions, one in the ancient dialect from Naple, the second one in English and the last one in Finnish in “A Journey into Christmas.” The song was created in the Neapolitan tradition of seventeenth century and it’is attributed to S. Alfonso Maria de Liguori. This song, which includes among its interpreters one of the finest international voices, our singer Mina, is the background music of the famous Christmas carol, “You come down from the stars.”
Among the songs that we find in the album, it is worth mentioning an interesting version of “Singaba Hamba Yothin” sung in the typical and warm sound of popular and traditional South Africa, in a singing performance between the language of South Africa and English.
The album “A Journey into Christmas” brings with it multi-cultural influence that characterizes the Vox Aurea Choir since 2009, when Sanna Salminen, choir conductor and producer of the album together with Risto Ronnberg & Mika Koivusalo, took over the running of the choir. Vox Aurea is a choir of 35-45 voices, aged between 11 and 17 years. It was born in 1968 and acquired an international reputation since 1994 under the leadership of the famous composer Pekka Kostiainen. For over 40 is one of the best choirs in Finland, winning prizes in various national and international competitions.
You can find the choir Vox Aurea in their Facebook page or on Youtube in their VoxAureaFIN channel where you can see and hear some of their live performances.
Information on
Vox Aurea – www.voxaurea.fi
Alba Records – Vox Aurea “A journey into Christmas” CD