Christmas
Kieron Tyler
Another day, another country Christmas album. Yesterday, on theartsdesk, Kacey Musgraves’s A Very Kacey Christmas was given the once-over. Today, it’s the more storied, more venerable Loretta Lynn and White Christmas Blue, her second-ever Christmas album and the belated sequel to 1966’s Country Christmas. Fifty years ago, that album opened with its self-penned title track. In 2016, a remake becomes the second song on the new White Christmas Blue.“Away in a Manger” was on Country Christmas and it crops up again on White Christmas Blue. The same with “Blue Christmas", “Frosty the Snowman", “ Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Another day, another country Christmas album. Yesterday, on theartsdesk, Kacey Musgraves’s A Very Kacey Christmas was given the once over. Today, it’s the more storied, more venerable Loretta Lynn’s White Christmas Blue, her second-ever Christmas album and the belated sequel to 1966’s Country Christmas. Fifty years ago, that album opened with its self-penned title track. In 2016, a remake becomes the second song on the new White Christmas Blue.“Away in a Manger” was on Country Christmas and it crops again on White Christmas Blue. The same with “Blue Christmas, “Frosty the Snowman", “White Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Slade. McCartney. Jona Lewie. There’s a reason that every festive compilation album released since the mid-90s has featured exactly the same songs: the human race has lost the ability to write a Christmas-themed track that is just the right combination of schmaltz and saccharine to become an instant Mariah Carey-level classic.It’s not for lack of trying: almost every Christmas cash-in that arrives with us at theartsdesk includes at least one, usually more, self-penned number amongst the usual selection of classic covers. Sometimes, they come close to working (although I confess to having not Read more ...
graham.rickson
Bach: Christmas Oratorio Windsbacher Knabenchor, Deutsche Kammer-Virtuosen Berlin/Karl Friedrich Beringer (Cantatas 1-3) and Martin Lehman (nos. 4-6) (Sony)Two notable versions of Bach’s Christmas Oratorio have just appeared – John Butt’s will be reviewed next week. This one uses modern instruments, though the Deutsche Kammer-Virtuosen Berlin’s playing is never muddy, the crisp articulation and brightness of tone frequently suggesting that they’re a period band in disguise. There are also two conductors, the work’s two halves were taped in the same venue four years apart. Not that you’d Read more ...
Matthew Wright
TV’s Gareth Malone has been pounding the pavement from the Perranarworthal Handbell Ringers in Cornwall to the Brighouse and Rastrick Brass Band in West Yorkshire to curate a national expression of Christmas. Each group gets Malone’s motivational treatment, and the result is a shiny bauble of an album, ideal for engaging a broad family taste. Malone’s “British” selection of songs has an admirably cosmopolitan slant, embracing nationality in the sense of adopted experience rather than origin. From “Silent Night”, to the choral suite from the Disney hit Frozen, these pieces are part of Read more ...
Katie Colombus
If Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas” makes you want to burn the nearest decorated pine tree and Michael Buble’s Christmas croons give you the urge to shove brussel sprouts in your ears, Pentatonix’s new festive album could be the perfect antidote to Xmas crabbiness.Known for their Christmas album of 2014 (in particular a hyper-hip version of The Nutcracker), this five-piece a capella group from Texas (Kirstie Maldonado, Mitch Grassi, Scott Hoying, Avi Kaplan and Kevin Olusola) offer up a few more festive songs with an unexpectedly cool twist. They sing in close harmony, combining Read more ...
David Nice
Second and third times lucky: after the migraine-inducing multimedia overload of Peter Sellars's premiere production of El Niño, first seen in London in 2003 and subsequently excoriated in eloquent prose by the composer himself, John Adams's layered masterpiece has had two further performances here proving that the drama is all in the music. Vladimir Jurowski's 2013 Festival Hall interpretation literally had the edge, in its razor-sharp focus, on last night. But it's always good to see the composer as conductor make light of his rhythmic complexity as he nears his 70th birthday, and we also Read more ...
Hanna Weibye
Christmas - in the shape of Peter Wright's Nutcracker - has arrived earlier than usual at the Royal Opera House. This is to make space for a 70th anniversary run of The Sleeping Beauty that starts on 21 December: the two will run in tandem through the holiday period, scheduling that assumes audiences can't get enough of Tchaikovsky-and-tutus at Christmas. And I'm sure they can't, when the purveyors of said delights are the Royal Ballet.It helps that Wright's Nutcracker is a classic of the genre, almost perfect in every way. I say almost, because I began to feel, on last night's viewing, that Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There are around 800 pages in a Dickensian doorstopper and it has been said around 800 times that if Dickens were working today he would be a show runner on a soap. Finally it has come to pass. Andrew Davies attempted something similar with his Bleak House, diced up into half-hour gobbets. But Dickensian is nothing less – or maybe that should be nothing more – than EastEnders in top hats and mobcaps.Its 20 episodes have been scheduled over that time of year which Dickens wishes could happen all the year round, two episodes a day. Its scriptwriter Tony Jordan, formerly of EastEnders, had Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Some time in the late 1280s, the artist Cimabue was wandering in the Tuscan countryside when he chanced upon a boy shepherd. According to Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists is the source for most such stories, the boy was “portraying a sheep from nature on a flat and polished slab, with the stone slightly pointed, without having learnt any method of doing this from others, but only from nature.” The young untrained artist was Giotto, who would be taken to Florence as Cimabue's apprentice and soon outstrip his master.Posterity has been deprived of the sheep scratched in stone. But Giotto would Read more ...
David Nice
Relatively recent tweaks to the abundant London concert scene have resulted in top-end events right up to Christmas. We have in part to thank the seasonal festival at St John’s Smith Square, postponing the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s holidays, putting them together with superb soloists and choirs, and serving up major Handel and Bach. One snag: their Christmas Oratorio when I last went to hear it turned out to be only four cantatas out of the sequence of six.You’d have to pay two period-instrument horn players if you included Part Four – the OAE didn’t – and yet as Richard Read more ...
Florence Hallett
On this dark, silent night as the world holds its breath in anticipation, everything is still but for the occasional whisper of a breeze ruffling the curtains. It is so quiet that a deer, that most nervous of creatures, has tiptoed all the way up to the window, gazing beyond us to a point further inside the room. The mirror on the dressing-table allows us to share the view into the room behind us, and there is a glimpse of a cot, the Christmas rose that hangs over it symbolising the Virgin Mary. And yet, something is wrong. It is far too quiet, the cot is empty: the deer has come to pay Read more ...