Customer Reviews

Baroque Christmas Music

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This low-priced CD is simply the best Christmas CD you will ever find. The music is positive, rich in instrumentation, bright, moving, and tolerable with many repeats. It will fill your house or business with the exact atmosphere you need for a classy, heartwarming Christmas. You will feel like celebrating when you hear this music.

This CD of Baroque (and some earlier) music features the renowned Ludwig Guettler Brass Ensemble and Guettler's Virtuosi Saxoniae chamber group performing Christmas (and some non-Christmas) music. If you like brass instruments playing Baroque period music, you will love this CD.

However, not all the selections on the CD are Christmas related. Tracks 3, 8, 10, 11, and 12, beautiful as they may be, don't have an obvious connection with the Christmas season. The longest piece is Corelli's Christmas Eve Concerto, ending with the well-known pastorale that Handel appropriated for his own use. The Corelli is performed by the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra and doesn't involve Guettler's brass. Another piece, Air from Handel's water Music, is performed by the Budapest strings. All the rest are performed by Guettler's Brass Ensemble or his Virtuosi Saxoniae.

The best selections on the CD are those performed by the brass ensemble alone, in my opinion. These include "In Dulce Jubilo" (Track 1), "Jubilate Domino" (Track 4), "Vom Himmel Hoch" (Track 7), "Tochter Zion" (Track 10), and the concluding "Trumpet and Air" (Track 12) by Henry Purcell. But all selections are played well, and the acoustic quality is superb, especially for the brass, which sound like they're playing in your living room. This CD was digitally recorded in 1990 and is now also available as an MP3 download. The included liner notes are brief and too general in nature to be of much use to those who want to know more about the specific pieces on this CD.