Throughout this month, as part of all the holiday music you'll hear on WXXI Classical from throughout the centuries and around the world, we're turning the CD Spotlight over to WXXI Classical hosts and staff to share some of the albums of holiday music that they treasure and recommend.
Christmas with Kiri
Recommended by John Andres, Sunday morning host
New Zealand opera singer Kiri Te Kanawa was first recognized internationally when she appeared in a production of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” in London at the Royal Opera House in 1971. She was originally a pop singer in New Zealand with a song on the charts during the 1960’s. During the 1970’s to the 1990’s she performed various opera parts from the 17th to 19th centuries throughout the world. In 1984, Leonard Bernstein selected her for the singing part of Maria in a new recording of West Side Story. Recently, Kiri was in the cast of PBS-favorite "Downton Abby," playing the role of Dame Nellie Melba, the first diva from New Zealand.
For my Christmas holiday selection, I have chosen the CD “Christmas with Kiri”. The recording was made in 1985 and features several holiday favorites and some selections that you may have never heard. You’ll warm to Felix Bernard’s “Winter Wonderland”, Franz Gruber’s “Silent Night” and Adolphe Adam’s “O Holy Night”. Other selections include: Norman Newell’s “The Most Wonderful Birthday of All”, the Spiritual “Mary’s Boy Child” and John Debbs’ “The Virgin Washes the Swaddling."
Aural Borealis / The Publick Musick
Recommended by Brenda Tremblay, morning host
This album shines with "woo." It quivers with a kind of spiritual depth despite its flaws. Sure, the sound quality is a little swimmy, and the strings get a little pitchy, but I’ve listened to it straight through dozens of times over the years, and if you’re looking for unusual Christmas music with a mystical quality, this early offering from The Publick Musick will transport you to Renaissance Italy with a silky mix of choral and instrumental works.
Italy of the 1600s was a land of contrasts. Science flowered alongside artistic brilliance and deep superstition. While Galileo was gazing deep into the cosmos, Claudio Monteverdi was pioneering a new art form, opera, elevating the human voice. The rich flourished, and the Church held tremendous power. Yet the poor remained poor. As architects were finishing St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, plague doctors in early hazmat suits still roamed the streets of Venice.
“Aural Borealis” encapsulates these contrasts; the dark, the light, the dramatic and serene. Giovanni Gabrieli’s setting of “O magnum mysterium” unspools alongside sparkling Baroque sonatas by Biaggio Marini and Dario Castello. In an ebullient Gloria by Claudio Monteverdi, the singers sound very much like red-blooded humans aspiring to the angelic.
Fans of the Rochester Early Music Festival will recognize musicians on the roster, including Deb Fox, who would later found Pegasus Early Music, and choral singers Marrlee Burgess, Barbara Consler, Alan Giambattista, and Lloyd Peasley. When they assembled twenty years ago in a resonant Catholic Church in Cortland, NY, Tom Folan conducted them all a program that shines like a star. Enjoy ~ and happy holidays!
Home for the Holidays and I'll be Home for the Holidays / Eaken Piano Trio
Recommended by Steve Johnson, midday host
For a long time, I have loved listening to piano trios, quartets, and quintets. These ensembles got me through a lot of dissertation writing—truth be told, I created a playlist over 140 hours long for my final dissertation push in the 2022-23 school year. So I was very pleased in the holiday season to discover a couple albums by the Eaken Piano Trio that allowed me to celebrate even as I continued to plug away at my research.
These two albums, “Home for the Holidays” and “I’ll Be Home For The Holidays,” contain pleasant arrangements of both popular Christmas songs and some classical favorites for the season, and the second one even includes some beautiful Hanukkah music. Now with my dissertation behind me, I am so happy to be sharing them with you this holiday season!
Letters to Kamilla: Music in Jewish Memory / Mosaic Voices
Recommended by Mona Seghatoleslami, afternoon/evening host & music director
Mosaic Voices is an a cappella vocal group dedicated to performing, recording, filming and commissioning new music from the Jewish tradition. It is the resident choir of the New West End Synagogue in Bayswater, London. And they reached my ears just a couple years ago with their album “Letters to Kamilla.”
Beyond that musical letter (a powerful story that you can read about here), I have been drawn into this recording the beautiful singing and harmonies, combining new melodies and arrangements for old texts. Mosaic Voices sings the ancient Sabbath prayer “Adon Alom” to the music of “Scarborough Fair” - and to the Sherman brothers’ song “Feed the Birds.”
This blending of the old and new, rooted in tradition and connecting across generations, is a musical light seems to fit for musically sharing in my friends and neighbors' celebrations of Hanukkah.
