New Holiday Music Recordings for 2009

Every year the holiday season brings a large number of new seasonal recordings. They often arrive after our deadline, but this year it seems that a number of producers have caught on and sent out some interesting titles way ahead of their release dates. The holiday season always brings out the best and worst in music, but since we’ve weeded out the worst, let’s look at some of the best.

The most entertaining of the group is Hot Club Cool Yule on Azica Records CD (****1/2), featuring the Hot Club of San Francisco, a modern manifestation of the original Quintette du Hot Club de France, which flourished in the 1930s and ’40s and featured jazz greats Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli. The Hot Club of San Francisco musicians always wished Reinhardt and Grappelli had made a holiday recording, so they approached this record with the question, what would Django do? The disc begins with Steve Allen’s "Cool Yule" and then sets a tone of elegant fun as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" glides onto the floor as the tango "Don Rudolfo." Other highlights include "Sugar Rum Cherry," a laid back and seductive version of Tchaikovsky’s "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy," "Djingle Bells," "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town," and a rollicking, virtuoso version of "Auld Lang Syne." You’ll find more serious moments with "The Christmas Song" and "I Wonder as I Wander," but the musical humor throughout the program is sly and wry. There might not be any guffaws, but there are endless chuckles and high spirits that are always in good taste, impeccably performed, and recorded in sound that has good presence, clarity, and wide stereo separation.

In my household it wouldn’t be December without a new recording of holiday fare from a British choir of men and boys, and this year Harmonia Mundi is offering Carols by Candlelight (****1/2), featuring the Choir of Magdalen College, Oxford, led by Bill Ives, with Martin Ford at the organ. With all due respect to the choirs of King’s College and St. John’s, which have set the standard in this repertory for years, I find the boy sopranos of Magdalen College to be as close to angelic as anything I’ve ever heard. Their sound floats free and clear, and though it’s never forced, it has force when required. The men who fill out the harmony by singing alto, tenor, and bass are equally accomplished, and the overall sound is rich, burnished, and always in tune. Of the 23 carols, which range from the Renaissance through to the 20th century, my favorites include T. Helmore’s strong, striding arrangement of "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," a perky version of the popular "Tomorrow Shall be My Dancing Day" by John Gardner, and a rousing "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," which features a stunning clarion descant for the boys in the last verse. The sound is radiant and warm with just the right amount of reverberation, and the soundstage is both wide and deep without any lost detail.

Another choral disc, Frohlocket ihr Völker auf Erden (OehmsClassics, ****) is performed by soloists, the Munich Bach Choir, and brass from the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, all conducted by Hansjörg Albrecht. The complete repertory was written by German romantic composers. Of course many of these, such as Brahms, Max Reger, Humperdinck, and Mendelssohn, are quite familiar, but there are also some new discoveries. The Overture, for instance, was written by Karl Hoyer (1834–1899), who is scarcely a household name but was quite respected as composer and teacher in his day. One of his more famous students was Jean Sibelius. The music is appealing and is performed with serious intent and attention to detail. I was especially struck by the raw majesty of Reger’s "Maucht hoch die Tür" and the ethereal beauty of Siegfried Karl-Elert’s "Vom Himmel Hoch," with its echo chorus and violin obbligato. The program was recorded at St. Rupert’s Church, which has a reverberation time of nine seconds! Considering that fact, the engineering team did a good job -- only in the loudest of climaxes, when everyone is singing or playing full tilt, does the sound become indistinct. But I’m surprised that Oehms, which has many SACD titles in its catalog (a complete copy of which is packaged with this release), didn’t opt for a multichannel format for this recording. It would surely have clarified some passages to have the echo where it belongs and not mixed back into the front channels.

There’s no problem with clarity on Jeff Cook’s Christmas Joy (Quest, ***1/2). The former Alabama member, who now tours with his own Allstar Goodtime Band, has selected a group of under-recorded country and rock tunes that he sings with simplicity and good cheer. The arrangements are uncluttered and, for the most part, the spirit is directly from the heart. The rockabilly tune "Run, Run, Rudolph" is a delight, as is "Rock and Roll Guitar," a song about a boy who doesn’t want anything but a guitar with a "big bass string" for Christmas. "Reggae Santa" gives us a picture of Christmas in the islands, while Cook’s wife, Lisa, gets the spotlight on two very different tunes, "Away in a Manger" and "Please Come Home for Christmas," proving that Jeff isn’t the only talent in the family. The Ventures join in for the opening "Christmas Joy," and the only misstep for me was the final cut, "My First Christmas in Heaven," which is narrated (seriously) rather than sung and seems out of place. The recorded sound is clean and has a fine dynamic range, with more stereo separation than you might expect from a country recording. If you can’t find the album locally, it’s available at www.jeffcook-agb.com.

. . . Rad Bennett