The St. John's College Choir (men and boys) has enjoyed wide success with previous holiday releases, partly due to excellent engineering (Signum's work in the St. John's College Chapel here is exemplary), more due to the clarity of the choral singing, and most of all due to the fresh and coherent programming concepts offered by director Andrew Nethsingha. Here the concept is stated briefly in the booklet, along with a brief background on the mostly new music: Christmas music, annotator Charlotte Gardner notes, is inseparable from tradition, but increasingly the Christmas album serves to expose new music especially in the English choral tradition. So here you get a variety of short pieces (three-and-a-half minutes max), rooted in, but not hewing to, traditional carols, a few of them by well-known composers (John Rutter, Bob Chilcott, Peter Warlock), but the majority are by names that will be new even to many English listeners. The overall mood is meditative, with just a few of the bumping-along, organ-accompanied sorts of work; much of the music is a cappella. Sample I Wonder as I Wander by the Swiss composer Carl Rutti: it's more than a setting of the American folk hymn, but not quite a fantasy of it. It might be termed a reflection on the hymn, and that formulation, one way or another, applies to many of the works on Christmas with St. John's, despite their brevity. A wonderful holiday release with a good measure of seriousness.

Rovi