Digging through the snowdrift of Christmas CDs released at this time of year can be heavy work, with rejects from cathedral and chapel choirs that should know better piling up in the search for something distinctive to accompany the mince pies and mulled wine.
Leaving aside the Dunedin Consort’s first-rate Christmas Oratorio (Linn), already released to rapturous reviews and in a class all its own, the most interesting festive album comes not from these shores but from distinctly un-wintry Kansas City, Missouri.
Kantorei, a delightfully light and springy choir, cleverly interleave attractive contemporary settings with rarely heard Renaissance motets from, among others, the gloriously named Melchior Vulpius and Blasius Ammon. To Bethlehem (Resonus) is a well-sung, carefully planned musical journey really worth taking, with some excellent new material from Matthew Culloton and Douglas Helvering.
Still across the Atlantic, the impressive Westminster Williamson Voices, recorded in the expansive acoustic of Princeton University chapel, fuse American and British traditions in Carolae (Naxos), a summation of UK composer James Whitbourn’s Christmas compositions, built around his 2004 Missa Carolae. His new double-choir Veni et illumina is a knockout.
Back on more familiar territory, Christmas with St John’s (Signum) is a meticulously sung carol collection from the always classy choir of St John’s College, Cambridge. Most arresting is O Oriens, by Cecilia McDowall, a beautiful setting of an Advent antiphon, its shimmering tone clusters and delicious suspensions evoking the morning star as it slowly rises through the heavens.
Wells Cathedral has a particularly fine set of boy and girl choristers this year, with soloist Madeleine Perring impressive in director of music Matthew Owens’s warmly attractive setting of Lullay, My Liking. A Wells Christmas (Resonus) is a stockingful of carols traditional and new, notably Thomas Hewitt Jones’s What Child Is This? and Bob Chilcott’s cheeky The Sparrow’s Carol.
And there’s more model singing from the chapel choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea on their collection Carols from Chelsea (Somm). Under the meticulous direction of William Vann, their reading of Howells’s A Spotless Rose is, well, spotless, while John Rutter’s Dormi, Jesu is saved from schmaltz and sung with the sweet, gentle grace it deserves.
But if you’re after something lighter, you can’t go wrong with the King’s Singers’ Christmas Songbook (Signum), which is something of a coda to their survey of the Great American Songbook, this time taking clever arrangements of seasonal favourites sung by the Rat Pack and others and placing them alongside traditional carols. In the wrong hands it could be ghastly, but it works, thanks to the quality of arrangements by Alexander L’Estrange, Keith Roberts and Robert Rice – and, of course, the excellence of the singing.
