It's Sunday and that means a Calendar Carol and though it may not look like it from the title this is a double, combining as it does 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentleman' with 'Carol of the Bells' - the latter composed in 1914 by Ukrainian Mykola Leontovych, the melody taken from a folk chant known as 'Shchedryk'.
The Sarajevo part of the title comes from a romanticised version of the real life story of Vedran Smailovic. In this story a cello player returns home during the Bosnian war after playing around the world with an orchestra, only to find his city in ruins. At the time the Serbs were shelling the city regularly but, rather than go to the bomb shelter, the musician took his cello and sat night after night on a pile of rubble playing Beethoven and Mozart. Some years later, the man was traced by a reporter who asked him why he did what he did and the musician said that it was his way of proving, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the spirit of humanity was still alive in his city.
The Ukrainian tune and the war setting, make it impossible not to think on 2022's biggest story and what's happening in another part of Europe at the moment. I'm wondering if the members of the rock band Savatage - for whom the Rock/Orchestral Trans-Siberian fusion is a side-project - are thinking of renaming the whole ensemble.