Customer Reviews

The Naxos Book of Carols

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This CD contains some wonderful variations of traditional Christmas carols. O Little Town of Bethlehem is hauntingly beautiful. The Holly and the Ivy is delightful. One of my favorite holiday songs, Personent Hodie, is particularly interesting and well done. And all of this at a true value price!

Pitts's new tune for O Little Town of Bethlehem is very appealing, and the alternate tune for The Holly and the Ivy in some verses is beautiful. The arangements for O Come and Of the Father's Love Begotten are very striking.
The singers are good, whether as soloists or in chorus and their pronunciation is very clear. However, the organ is sometimes allowed to drown them out! And, at least for my taste, the organ ornamentation is very often far too discordant. Fortunately this does not happen in every song, and when it does occur, it is usually for one verse only.
Most of these arangements and settings I would love to hear again without the organ. Then I'd give it more stars!

This is a wonderful group of eight singers called Tonus Peregrinus. They have a clean sound, and near perfect execution. All of the carols are arranged by Anthony Pitts who deals very creatively with the problem of how to arrange familiar carols to render them fresh and appealing without submitting them to torture. My opinion is that the arrangements are very clever and worthwhile. Especially beautiful are "O little town of Bethlehem" and "Jesu, the very thought is sweet." Even the listener who has many, many Christmas CD's will find this to be a refreshing addition to their library.

This is not your usual set of Christmas Carols sung by the local church choir. The arrangements are unusual, creative and cleaver. You will do a double take on some of them but that is what makes this CD more than interesting. Each year I listen, I find something more to like.

Take a risk. It is worth it.

I bought this album having listened to only one song in which the acoustics and so on were very pleasant, and since I like to hear the differences in the reverberations of the cathedrals in which these songs are recorded, I thought this would add to the general richness of music available. The moderized arrangements, however, were so very weird, disruptive, cacaphonic, or conceptually (therefore musically and vocally) in an emotional and mental range alien to the text, the most of the album created a jangled and irritated experience.