DAYS DWINDLE DOWN

A TIME FOR KEEPING CLOSE TO HOME as nights are long and days are brisk. There's ice on the pond, and the evening brings owls' lonely hoots from the woods as they seek companions for the winter night.

This year we managed to get to Cambridge before the Christmas holiday to see the original Christmas Revels (which has now spread to Washington D.C., Seattle, Portland, Oregon, Houston and other points) for a rollicking three-hour "time out of time" that opened the holiday celebrations with great cheer.  

And Ludwig von Beethoven had the good grace to be born on December 16, which led our local public broadcasting station, WGBH, to throw a gala birthday bash of works well-known and rare. They've posted a video of a delightful WoO (work without opus, not part of the official Beethoven catalog) 152 No. 8, "Come Draw We Round the Cheerful Ring" with renowned tenor William Hite in an arrangement for piano, cello and mandolin. And the entire concert, which includes a fabulous performance of the "Les Adieux" piano sonata No. 26 by Gilles Vonsattel, as well as a memorable Hite-Vonsattel rendering of the song cycle "An Die Ferne Geliebte," is available in an audio-on-demand link at the same website. We were fortunate to be sitting in the second row of the visually and aurally gorgeous Fraser performance studio, but enjoy recapturing it from the Web.

There's a sense of bustle this year, as folks who've trimmed back in recent seasons are engaging the short-day season with great gusto -- to drive the darkness away.