The success of this recording among the 2016 Christmas crop from England shows that there's still an appetite for holiday recordings of a more or less traditional kind, mostly minus the ambitious, multinational, contemporary experiments that have been common. The large majority of the music is British, with a good sprinkling of traditional tunes in one form or another. There are some exceptions, including an unusually mainstream piece by Charles Ives and some familiar German pieces, but for the most part what you get here ...
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The success of this recording among the 2016 Christmas crop from England shows that there's still an appetite for holiday recordings of a more or less traditional kind, mostly minus the ambitious, multinational, contemporary experiments that have been common. The large majority of the music is British, with a good sprinkling of traditional tunes in one form or another. There are some exceptions, including an unusually mainstream piece by Charles Ives and some familiar German pieces, but for the most part what you get here is what you might have gotten from this choir 50 or even 100 years ago. Sample the Vaughan Williams arrangement of O Little Town of Bethlehem for the flavor of the whole: bright, clean, rather innocent. The title work by Matthew Martin comes at the end, with an organ accompaniment, for a big finale, but generally there's little attempt at imperial splendor or, on the other hand, modern introspection. The boy sopranos of the Choir of New College, Oxford, under Robert Quinney show...
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