Lux de Caelo: Music for Christmas (2014)

performed by Alexander Peter (tenor), Charles Littlewood (bass), Christopher Loyn (tenor), David Miller (theorbo), Dmitri Ensemble, Elliot Fitzgerald (baritone), Gabrielle Haigh (soprano), Helen Lilley (soprano), Hugo Popplewell (bass), Madeleine Seale (soprano)
composed by Anton Webern, Arnold Schoenberg, Benjamin Britten, Christmas Traditional, Edgar Pettman, Felix Mendelssohn, Giles Swayne, Graham Ross, Johann Sebastian Bach, John Rutter, John Tavener, Michael Praetorius, Noah Greenberg, Ralph Vaughan Williams

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This is one of a group of releases by long-established British collegiate and cathedral choirs to update their repertory a bit in the venerable medium of the Christmas album, and it may be the best of the bunch. Director Graham Ross picks a program that shifts stylistic perspectives several times, but is held together by the fact that the pieces are basically all carols (with the possible exception of the final Friede auf Erde of Schoenberg, certainly a desirable inclusion at the moment). Ross' segues are novel and even startling, but the pieces are linked together convincingly: try that from the familiar eight-voice Michael Praetorius setting of In dulci jubilo (track 10) to the modern treatment of the Coventry Carol by Giles Swayne that flows. The program stretches from traditional tunes through Bach, Mendelssohn, Schoenberg, and Webern to John Rutter, happily coexisting with the more atonal stuff; it's really a grand survey of what the idea of the Christmas carol has meant over hundreds of years.... Read Less

This is one of a group of releases by long-established British collegiate and cathedral choirs to update their repertory a bit in the venerable medium of the Christmas album, and it may be the best of the bunch. Director Graham Ross picks a program that shifts stylistic perspectives several times, but is held together by the fact that the pieces are basically all carols (with the possible exception of the final Friede auf Erde of Schoenberg, certainly a desirable inclusion at the moment). Ross' segues are novel and even ... Read More