There’s no shortage of “standard” Christmas music in my CD collection–the usual popular versions of carols sung by Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Stresiand and other pop artists–but I have found a few things that I find myself listening to more at Chrsitmas.
For those who love classical music: if you can find it (I don’t know if it’s been de-catalogued or not), a lovely Christmas CD is
“The Carol Album: Seven Centuries of Christmas Music” by The Taverner Consort, Choir & Players and Andrew Parrott. My copy is from 1989 on the EMI label, catalogue Number CDC 7 49809 2. It has a collection of English, German, French, Spanish and Italian Christmas carols from, as the title suggests, the past seven centuries. It’s my favourite Christmas CD and has been an indipensable part of my Christmas listening for the past 16 years.
Last year I purchased
J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, directed by John Eliot Gardiner. It played all day on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day
Though not a fan of so-called New Age Music in the 90s, I once accidentally received a copy of the Windham Hill album
The Carols of Christmas from a CD Club i used to belong to. It has some amazingly beautiful instrumental versions of traditional Christmas carols, but what made me hold onto the CD was a wonderful version of “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” by Loreena McKennitt that she recorded with a Middle Eastern air–a curious combination of musical styles that worked beautifully in this case! It’s worth digging up a copy of the CD just for that track alone, imho.
Now, in the “curiouser and curiouser” department, if you can lay hands on a copy of The Monkees’ (yes,
those Monkees) Missing Links, Vol. 2 CD, you’ll find a lovely little a-cappella version of “Riu, Riu Chiu”, a 16th century Spanish Christmas carol that they recorded for a Christmas episode of their TV show. It’s short, but lovely. They do a nice job with the harmonies.
Finally, somewhere along the way I acquired (I cannot for the life of me remember where or how) a copy of a Christmas CD entitled We Three Kings by the New York folk trio The Roches. It’s a mixed bag, actually. There are some cringingly
bad clunkers on it, such as their annoying versions of “Frosty The Snowman” and “Winter Wonderland”, sung with exaggerated
New Yahwk accents, an awkward arrangement of “Deck The Halls” with clunky acoustic rhythm guitars and cheesy harmonies, and an otherwise-lovely version of “Joy To The World” which is spoilt by a sudden feminist shift to “She rules the world with truth and grace…” in one of the verses. Makes me want to fling the thing out the window every time I forget to program my CD player to skip those tracks.
I try to pick up something new each year, so I’m currently scanning the Amazon UK pages for this year’s musical purchases.
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