Recording of the Week, Benjamin Appl comes home for Christmas

When my colleagues and I held our September sweepstake on which star singer would be delivering this year’s solo Christmas album, German baritone Benjamin Appl didn’t even figure as a rank outsider. Primarily known as a Lieder singer, the Fischer-Dieskau protégé is a quietly classy, rather earnest musical personality, signed to a label which tends to focus on lesser-spotted repertoire and quirky curated recitals rather than anything so mainstream as Christmas. (Appl’s previous recording for them was an eclectic album exploring the theme of temptation, with a Kurtág project coming in the New Year).

It turns out that Appl’s contribution to the season of goodwill is as thoughtfully assembled as one of his Lieder programmes, and performed with the same level of care. To mark the festive period he’s returned home to Regensburg, where he and his two brothers were choristers - or ‘cathedral sparrows’, as they’re affectionately known - throughout their childhood. (The Director of Music for part of that time, incidentally, was Georg Ratzinger, brother of the late Pope Benedict).   

It's become something of a cliché for singers to enthuse that music was always the heart of their childhood Christmases, but in Appl’s case it really is true. From the age of nine he sang five services in 36 hours, including the choir’s annual visit to Regensburg prison on Christmas Eve, and those boyhood experiences seem to have shaped his rather introspective perspective on Christmas. Several of the songs here speak to the loneliness which can come into sharper focus during the holiday period, something of which Appl became acutely aware through seeing the prisoners’ responses to carols and singing with boys who spent Christmas away from their families thanks to the cathedral’s packed schedule.

It's clear from the introduction of 'Adeste, fideles' (beautifully shaped by the strings of the Münchner Rundfunkorchester) that subtle elegance is going to be the order of the day here. Appl takes the first verse (in Latin), switching to English for the second and German for the third and fourth, where the ‘sparrows’ deliver the Willcocks descant with a joyful purity to rival their peers in Cambridge.

The Regensburg boys are far more than a supporting act on the album, taking the spotlight for ebullient accounts of Hammerschmidt’s 'Machet die Tore weit' and Schnabel’s 'Transeamus usque Bethlehem' (apparently a Regensburg speciality), and showcasing their gorgeous blend in Praetorius’s 'Es ist ein Ros' entsprungen'. Treble Ilias Grau joins Appl with admirable poise for the Evening Prayer from Humperdinck’s Hänsel und Gretel, a favourite of German opera-houses over the holidays.

Appl himself contributes a thoughtful mixture of oratorio arias and Christmas songs in four different languages. In the first camp, the prophet’s vision of future peace from Mendelssohn’s Elijah is done with calm radiance, and 'Grosser Herr, o starker König' from Bach’s Christmas Oratorio finds Appl (lighter of voice than one often hears in this aria) and the principal trumpet on deliciously fleet-footed form.

Appl’s adopted country (he became a UK citizen in 2019) is represented by Michael Head’s 'The Three Mummers' and John Rutter’s 'Christmas Lullaby' and 'Joseph’s Carol', all sung with tender loving care for the text. Further afield, there’s also a glowing rendition of the popular Swedish carol 'Jul, jul, strålande jul', and a charming little rarity by Cécile Chaminade – ‘Le Noël des oiseaux’, in which a child asks God to remember the birds battling the cold weather. It sounds twee on paper, but it’s the sweetest thing on the album.

Appl chooses wisely when it comes to letting his hair down, eschewing ill-advised pop covers in favour of a sincerely-sung 'Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas' and a rustic, rumbustious curiosity in the form of ‘Geh, Hansl, pack dei Binggerl zsamm’ - in which conductor Florian Helgath picks up a Styrian accordion to accompany Appl as he exerts a friend to pack butter and cheese (rather than gold or frankincense) as a gift for baby Jesus.

The final track sees Appl’s mother Edeltraud, an amateur guitarist, joining her son for an especially pensive 'Stille Nacht', with the Sparrows later lending their voices. It makes for a luminous close to one of the loveliest Christmas albums in some years.