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Classy Cheer
Pianist's Christmas CD freshens the familiar
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Published: December 14, 2008
Pamela Howland has a thing for Christmas.
Howland, a pianist who teaches at Wake Forest University, has recorded four CDs of Christmas music to date. Her latest effort is Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas: 10 Original Arrangements, which tops my annual roundup of recordings of Christmas and non-Christmas music you might buy during the holiday season. (Merry Little Christmas can be ordered at www.pamelahowland.com.)
Merry Little Christmas was made in loving memory of Howland's mother, Doris Drewitz Howland (1927-2006). There's a touching photo of Pamela and Doris Howland in the CD's liner.
Doris Howland, also a pianist, loved playing Christmas music, especially tunes, which like the title track of her daughter's CD, were written in the 1940s. Merry Little Christmas features "I'll Be Home for Christmas" and "White Christmas," in addition to such older, timeless classics as "The First Noel" and "We Three Kings."
Howland's arrangements employ decorations judiciously. They can be likened to a sparse-yet-elegant string of small white lights wrapped around a tree outside a house, not an excessive multicolored extravaganza imported from Las Vegas.
Howland often combines the singing style of the Romantic era with the sensibility of a jazz balladeer. Or she unleashes a clever surprise -- as when, for example, she slyly inserts an excerpt from Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition beneath and between statements of the melody from "We Three Kings."
The playing is musical and full of personality. It can be enjoyed on two levels, as background for socializing or as a way to engage the more attentive listener.
A rowdier Christmas CD comes courtesy of Sony Classics, which recorded Yo-Yo Ma & Friends: Songs of Joy and Peace.
Ma, the virtuoso classical cellist without peer, says in press materials that Joy and Peace began "with the idea of a party" in which colleagues from various musical persuasions might get together and perform largely familiar Christmas fare.
The other performers include everyone from jazz vocalist Diana Krall to Wu Tong and the Silk Road Ensemble. The result is a heady mix of eclectic, energetic delights.
As for other recordings you might consider, I once again approached some of the area's many knowledgeable musicians for their suggestions. Here is what they said:
□ William Osborne, the music director of the Piedmont Chamber Singers, recommends Andrew Carter's Christmas Carols (York Ambisonic). The performers include Carter, the Quire of London and organist John Scott.
Osborne said that Carter's music "offers all sorts of delights, confirming my impression that to some extent, the Brits have a copyright on the essence of Christmas music."
□ When the Winston-Salem State University Choir toured the Czech Republic in 2006, it teamed up with the Dvorak Symphony Orchestra in Prague to record Somewhere Far Away: the Music of Julian Williams (Albany Records).
"I like this recording, because it features my very own students … with the world-renowned Dvorak Symphony Orchestra," D'Walla Simmons Burke, who conducted, wrote in an e-mail. "This is our first recording with a major label. The music within this project can be labeled as easy-listening with a profound story embedded."
Williams wrote the soundtrack for Lifetime TV's Fighting for our Future.
□ Joe Mount plays horn in the Winston-Salem Symphony and is an administrator at the UNC School of the Arts.
He recommends that Christmas shoppers buy Dvorak for Winds (MSR Classics). This recording features Windscape performing arrangements for winds of such Dvorak gems as Dvorak's A Major Piano Quintet.
David Jolley, a horn virtuoso who teaches at the UNC School of the Arts, did the arrangements and performs on the recording, as does oboist Randall Ellis, a UNCSA alumnus, and flutist Tara Helen O'Conner, who performed at UNCSA as part of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center's recent performance there.
"This was an unexpected discovery," Mount wrote in an e-mail. "Purists may object that the works are transcriptions, but they capture the Czech tunefulness and energy that makes Dvorak's music so appealing."
□ Robert Simon, the music director of the Piedmont Wind Symphony, has a soft spot for a recording featuring Louis Armstrong and another with Arturo Sandoval, who soloed with the symphony last spring.
But his top recommendation for this column is Frederick Fennell: the Cleveland Symphonic Winds (Telarc Digital), which was made in 1978 in Severance Hall, the home of the world-renowned Cleveland Orchestra.
Fennell (1914-2008) was "a much-recorded conductor who invented the contemporary wind ensemble," his obituary in The Washington Post said.
In Fennell, the first digital commercial recording, Fennell leads members of the Cleveland Orchestra and others in such works as Holst's two Suites for Military Band, Handel's Music for Royal Fireworks, Sousa's Stars and Stripes and Grainger's Lincolnshire Posy. There is also a stirring account of Arnaud's Olympic Fanfare.
"You could not expect a better sound and a more musical performance," Simon wrote in an e-mail. "Everyone I have ever played this for ordered a copy -- it is habit forming."
■ Ken Keuffel can be reached at 727-7337 or at kkeuffel@wsjournal.com.
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