¡Feliz Navidad! – Mexican Baroque Music for Christmas Kölner Akademie/Michael Alexander Willens (CPO)
Two of the four composers featured in this effervescent anthology never set foot in early 18th century Mexico. However, printed copies of sacred works by the Madrid-based Francisco Corselli and José de Nebra did cross the Atlantic for liturgical use in newly built Mexican cathedrals. There’s some delectable music here, the works by Manuel de Sareumaya and Ignacio Jerusalem especially enjoyable. The Italian-born Jerusalem (1707-1769), based in Cadiz before being lured to Mexico, is represented by four numbers taken from his 1764 Matins for the Virgin of Guadalupe. Though composed for the Feast of the Assumption in August, they would have been reprised during Advent. The lilting “Quem terra pontus sidera” is sublime, and “Quae est ista quea ascendit” is an exuberant solo number for bass Thomas Bonni. The pieces by Sumaya set Spanish texts rather than Latin ones, my favourite being the six-minute “Angélicas Milicias”. Alto Caroline Marçot’s duet with tenor André Cruz is a moment to savour, a blast of bright Iberian sunshine. José de Nebra’s sunny Polychoral Mass in G is the longest work included, a work full of bouncing rhythms and fruity horn calls. Performances here are excellent, conductor Michael Alexander Willens drawing rich colours and snappy rhythms from his Cologne forces. Craig H. Russell’s detailed sleeve note is a good read, and the album is ripely recorded. I loved this disc. You will too.
Miró Quartet: Hearth (Pentatone)
The Miró Quartet’s Ginastera disc wowed me earlier this year, so I was keen to hear their Christmas album. Hearth doesn’t disappoint, a collection of 15 mostly traditional carols reimagined for string quartet by 15 different composers. I’ve been listening to it on repeat for weeks and played tracks from it to a class of four-year old children last week, their spontaneous singing along with Michi Wiancko’s version of “Jingle Bells” one of my 2025 musical highlights. Do read the individual composers’ words on each piece, Wiancko revealing that “it’s a rare treat to be asked to participate in a project that centres around pure fun and celebration.” Exactly - sample Karl Mitze’s exuberant version of “Deck the Halls” and it’s difficult not to grin. Every track hits the mark. Alex Berko’s “In the Bleak Midwinter” really does emerge and fade “through shimmers of lightly falling snow” and Anna Clyne’s take on the “Coventry Carol” scales dizzying heights, the rich textures abruptly dropping out near the close. Derrick Skye’s “We Three Kings” has the melody filtered through Arabic and African influences. The closer, Hyung-ki Joo’s “Songs of Christmas Past”, is the longest item, an eight-minute ‘musical stocking’ which gleefully quotes from over 20 seasonal songs. Play this at full volume and listen to the Miró’s players unexpectedly multitasking to impressive effect. A blast: brilliantly played and well-recorded. Nice sleeve art too.
Nutcracker Unwrapped: Winter Tales from Around the World Asya Fateyeva (saxophones), with the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz/Vilmontas Kallunas et al (Berlin Classics)
Nutcracker Unwrapped feels like a pair of separate EPs collected on a single disc, but the whole album was recorded over five consecutive days last June. The Nutcracker section is composer and arranger Wolf Kerschek’s witty recasting of numbers from the Tchaikovsky ballet with added solo saxophone. It’s ear-catching stuff, a piquant take on the “Arabian Dance” particularly alluring. Asya Fateyeva’s sinuous, liquid playing is terrific, and listen out for the keyboards at the start of the “Dance to the East”. A familiar Prokofiev tune tries unsuccessfully to topple a fairy who’s consumed too much sugar but Tchaikovsky’s “Waltz of the Flowers” emerges relatively unscathed. Great fun, with excellent support from the Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz under Vilmontas Kallunas. The other numbers mostly team Fateyeva with the Berlin vocal quartet niniwe along with lute, cello and percussion. Arrangements, by the group’s Winnie Brückner, are idiomatic and inventive. There’s a gorgeous moment in the French carol “Noël Nouvelet” when the acapella voices suddenly move from singing in unison to four-part harmony. “The Snow it Melts the Soonest” is delicious, as is a suitably spare version of Britten’s “Corpus Christi Carol”.
Cuban Christmas The Sarahbanda (Deutsche Grammophon)
This latest collaboration between horn player Sarah Willis and her Cuban Sarahbanda sees a move from Alpha Classics to DG and another Tchaikovsky rewrite. Several movements in Joshua Davis and Yuniet Lombida’s Cuban Nutcracker Suite make excellent use of Willis’s punchy low register, the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” a witty example. These tunes are indestructible – look no further if you’re in need of a cha-cha-chá version of the “Dance of the Reed Pipes”. Another classical work given a Latin makeover is the first movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, pianist Edgar Olivero’s arrangement seamlessly switching between styles. The rest of this album consists of Cuban reinventions of Christmas standards. New to me was “Criolla Navidad” by Havanese composer Rodrigo Prats (it’s lovely), and Willis’s solo playing at the start of “Silent Night” is classy stuff. An extended version of Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” is another standout, Jorge Aragón’s arrangement abruptly but effectively switching gear four minutes in.
Here's Bernard Hughes’ selection:
Feminine Voices at Christmas Ensemble Altera/Christopher Lowrey, Li Shan Tan (harp) (Alpha)
Joy to the World Chanticleer/Tim Keeler (Delos)
Nowel: Advent and Beyond Ensemble Pro Victoria/TobyWard, with Cecily Beer (harp) and Rowan Williams (reader) (Delphian)
On Christmas Night London Choral Sinfonia/Michael Waldron (Orchid Classics)
The Wise Men and the Star The Sixteen/Harry Christophers (Coro)
All the Stars Looked Down: A John Rutter Celebration The Choir of Kings College, Cambridge/Daniel Hyde, with the Britten Sinfonia (King’s College Recordings)
John Rutter: A Clare College Celebration (Christmas Edition) The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge/Graham Ross, with the Dmitri Ensemble (Harmonia Mundi)
Here are seven Christmas discs, from choirs on both sides of the Atlantic, and covering repertoire from the standard to the off-the-beaten-track. The American choir Ensemble Altera celebrates Feminine Voices at Christmas, focusing on not just female singing voices but also women composers, from 12th century Hildegard to Kerensa Briggs (b.1991). The latter’s new Coventry Carol is a poised take on a classic text and Cecilia MacDowall’s Ave Maria has some lovely clustery harmony and a real air of mystery. Several items are accompanied by that Christmassy standby, the harp – here played by Li Shan Tan – and couple by organ, notably Barbara Strozzi’s Sacri musicali affetti, with a pitch-perfect solo by soprano Hannah Ely. The centrepiece of the album is Britten’s immortal A Ceremony of Carols. This is delightful, from the unadulterated joy of “Wolcum yole!”, to the delicious harmonic ambiguity of “Balulalow” to the fastest and most thrilling “This little babe” I’ve ever heard. This is a well-conceived and exceptionally well-sung disc, with credit to conductor Christopher Lowrey and multi-talented engineer Adrian Peacock, who also features as a composer.
From the upper voices of the east coast Ensemble Altera, to the men’s voices of the west coast Chanticleer, whose Joy to the World is full of their trademark combination of warm, jazzy close-harmony and clean and precise Renaissance repertoire. This stylistic catholicity is typified in putting the eponymous opener, in which the classic tune is swathed in rich (even slightly over-ripe) chords, alongside track 3, Michael Praetorius’s Rorate Caeli, spry and as light as a soufflé. The Praetorius is part of a sequence of older pieces that also takes in Palestrina and Morales, before moving onto some Christmas standards – “Once in Royal David’s City”, “Ding Dong Merrily on High”, “O Come All ye Faithful”, all in new arrangements made specially for the group. There is some entirely new music, in the form of Joanna Marsh’s “In Winter’s House”, already achieving classic status, alongside two new recently premiered companion pieces, “Hands and the Hour” and “Arrival at the Lantern Festival” which together make the sequence Winter’s Garland. These have an otherworldly grace and composure absent elsewhere. The singing is, of course, great throughout, although the stylistic lurches make listening straight through a bit disconcerting. One to sample, perhaps.
Next we cross the Atlantic for the British ensemble Pro Victoria, directed by Toby Ward. Their Nowel: Advent and Beyond has none of Chanticleer’s kitsch: it is a sincere and thoughtful exploration of Advent, a much neglected season these days in – ironically – Advent itself. This disc interpolates readings by former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams between mainly contemporary music by Piers Connor Kennedy (who also sings), David McGregor and Philip Stopford, as well as the 20th century Hugo Distler and Herbert Howells, plus William Byrd and Michael Praetorius. The music is mainly contemplative and serious: I enjoyed the harmonic astringency of Kennedy’s Advent Calendar and the nods to medieval tunes and modalities in his half-hour long sequence for six male voices and harp, Nowel el el. The readings are familiar from Nine Lessons services, where they are so often read badly. But not here: Rowan Williams is clear, understated and well-paced. I enjoyed the dignified rendition of Herbert Howells' A Spotless Rose and an assertive O Oriens by David McGregor, written for the Ensemble Pro Victoria in 2022.
The prodigiously productive London Choral Sinfonia put out their third album of the year, On Christmas Night, a lavish offering of seasonal music for choir with orchestra, including several new arrangements by Owain Park, the choir’s composer-in-residence. And where the previous disc was predominantly quiet and meditative, the LCS are high-spirited and extrovert. Percy Fletcher’s Ring Out, Wild Bells, and Jim Clements’s Awake, Glad Heart! both have swagger and the joy of the season, the excellent chamber orchestra arrangements punching above their weight. Two medleys I didn’t know are Alec Rowley’s instrumental Christmas Suite and Gustav Holst’s Christmas Day, the second of which features stirring solos by Martha McLorinen and Jimmy Holliday, and certainly deserves a similar place in the repertoire to the Vaughan Williams Fantasia on Christmas Carols. Much more familiar is Walking in the Air, a favourite of many, including me. It is sung here by 16-year-old Malakai Bayoh, discovered on Britain’s Got Talent, and perhaps with not long to go as a treble, here reinforced by choir alongside the famous rippling orchestral accompaniment. There is a rumbustious finish in a jolly Ding Dong Merrily on High (with splendid Neil Brough trumpet solo) and Iain Farrington’s syncopated Nova, nova.
The Sixteen’s The Wise Men and the Star has three world premiere recordings and a number of other contemporary pieces, alongside a handful of perennial favourites. Oliver Tarney’s title carol has a sense of wide-eyed seasonal wonder while Cecilia MacDowall’s Brightest Star is something else entirely, with a twitchy energy and a text about food shortages in the Channel Islands in World War II. Reena Esmail’s tripartite A Winter Breviary combines ecological themes with Hindustani ragas to interesting effect, and Kim Porter’s Benediction is fluid and fleet. Peter Hayward’s The Christ-Child Lullaby sets a beautiful Gaelic lullaby in a web of gathering textural strands, perhaps my favourite of the tracks, and John Ireland’s New Prince, New Pomp allows the Rolls Royce engine of the Sixteen open its throttle, elegantly but powerfully.
Lastly, and even more Christmassy than Rudolph sipping eggnog while listening to Mariah Carey, is a pair of albums celebrating John Rutter, worthy 80th birthday tributes to the contemporary composer who most encapsulates the modern British choral Christmas. All the Stars Looked Down, brings together Rutter and the choir of Kings College, Cambridge under director of music Daniel Hyde. The CD is truly a beautiful thing, the liner notes bound into the case as a booklet on glossy paper, and features tracks composed or arranged by Sir John alongside Willcocks favourites, with sparkling brass accompanying some and a chamber orchestra (the Britten Sinfonia) in others. The recording is produced by Adrian Peacock, popping up again, and engineer David Hinitt, who capture the resonance of the chapel without losing all the detail of the singing – but it is still a big space. I would have liked to have had more Rutter originals, fun as the arrangements are (particularly the Sans Day Carol), but there is his first published piece, The Nativity Carol and the recent All the Stars Looked Down, written in memory of Stephen Cleobury, long time director of music at King’s.
You get rather more Rutter for your money with John Rutter: A Clare College Celebration (Christmas Edition), performed by the Cambridge college where Rutter was both undergraduate and later director of music. It is led nowadays by the superlative Graham Ross, who conducts the choir and Dmitri Ensemble in a generous selection of Rutter originals (not all of them Christmassy), including the amateur choir favourites A Gaelic Blessing, Shepherd’s Pipe Carol and another appearance of the Nativity Carol. The whole album abounds in Rutter’s trademark earworm melodiousness and sensitivity to text. The choir and ensemble are more closely and warmly recorded than the King’s College album, in the easier acoustic of the Fairfield Halls in Croydon. Among the more familiar items is a stunning Ukrainian Blessing, prompted by the 2022 invasion, unlike any other Rutter I have heard, and very powerful. I hadn’t realised that Rutter often writes his own text, including for that favourite (and also very early) Shepherd’s Pipe Carol, which whistles along here in the highest of spirits. Of the two Rutter discs, I think I’d give the nod to the Clare over the King’s, for the sound and the Rutter-ratio.
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