Recording of the Week, Christmas Recordings from Fretwork and Christiane Karg

The popular picture of Christmas under the Tudor Protestant monarchs can sometimes drift towards a caricature of Cromwellian austerity. Certainly the run-up to December itself was strictly ring-fenced from any overspill of Christmas celebration; Advent was a season in its own right, a period of penitence akin to Lent and certainly not a time for merrymaking and Christmas markets!

But of course, the musical responses inspired by this period of piety are far from downbeat or dour, as a new collaboration between Fretwork and mezzo Helen Charlston illustrates. Combining Advent and Christmas selections from Byrd’s late 1580s English songbooks with works by his contemporaries Holborne, Gibbons, Peerson and Weelkes, it’s an intimate programme showcasing that uniquely Tudor style straddling both sacred and secular – avowedly religious works, but intended for use in the home rather than the church.

Interspersed between the solo vocal numbers, in which Charlston’s unfussy voice contrasts pleasingly with the viols’ sonority and all the performers audibly relish the subtle syncopation of Byrd’s style, are instrumental interludes and madrigalian songs for a small group of singers. The two excerpts from a set of seven fantasias by Gibbons featuring “ye great dooble bass” [sic] are particularly memorable, with the sprightliness of the parts offset by the gravitas of the bass instrument underpinning the texture.

Towards the end of the album, the trajectory moves decisively from Advent towards Christmas proper, and the closing three tracks peek beyond to the turn of the year. Holborne’s lively The New-Yeares Gift and Heigh ho holiday, the latter lasting only a minute, together act as a kind of prelude to the tutti finale, Byrd’s O God that guides the cheerful sun - likening the new year’s replacement of the old to the supplanting of human sin by pious virtue.

Katherine Cooper: If you’re already suffering from traditional festive music fatigue at this early stage in December, Christiane Karg and Gerold Huber’s delectable ‘Christmas Promenade’ could be just the antidote you need – no chestnuts of any variety on the menu here, just a beautifully-plotted programme of Lieder and mélodies on the theme of Christmas, from composers including Schumann, Marx, Chaminade, Toldrà, Grieg and Humperdinck (whose gently glowing ‘Licht der Welt’ gives the album its title).

In her engaging booklet-note, the German soprano recounts how she used the downtime resulting from a cancelled run of performances at the Metropolitan Opera last winter to explore lesser-spotted Christmas song-repertoire, and she’s unearthed some absolute beauties in the process. With the exception of Peter Cornelius’s Die Könige (a carol-concert staple for UK choirs who can field a decent baritone soloist from within the ranks), most of the material here was unfamiliar to me, but all of it’s utterly beguiling: quite aside from the pleasures to be had from enjoying the album on its own terms, it’s also an invaluable resource for any classical singers looking for seasonally-appropriate solo contributions to bring to the table for Christmas concerts.

Stand-outs include two earthy Spanish folk-carols by Joaquín Nin, Saint-Saëns’s unexpectedly sensual, operatic La Madonna col Bambino, and Chaminade’s tender little prayer for the frost-bitten birds overlooked by worshippers on their way to church. And nestling among the various retellings of the story of the Nativity and depictions of cosy fireside scenes are a few rather less orthodox perspectives on Christmas: Strauss’s posthumously-published Weihnachtsgefühl paints a moving picture of the sense of loss and isolation which many experience at this time of year, whilst Massenet’s Noël païen sings the praises of May rather than December, dismissing the Three Kings as ‘necromancers’ and throwing shade at the ‘morose’ aspects of Christianity (best not programme this one at Nine Lessons and Carols).

In larger-scale pieces by Gounod and Rossini (the latter, like Cornelius’s Die Könige, transposed upwards from the original version for baritone soloist), Karg’s silvery soprano soars magically above the full-throated Chor des Bayerischen Rundfunks, and both she and Huber are as responsive as ever to texts and harmonic light and shade. This has to be my favourite classical Christmas album in some years.