The Holiday Music Fest

The other day, I wrote here about how one of my favorite holiday albums was Christmas Goes Baroque, with traditional and popular Christmas songs gorgeously arranged in the style of Baroque composers.  Czechoslovakia State Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by Peter Breiner, who also did all the great arrangements.

Days after posting that, to my great surprise and pleasure, I received a very nice email of appreciation from...Peter Breiner.  He's quite an accomplished fellow -- not only with over 200 recordings (I don't even own 200 CDs...), but he wrote a weekly newspaper column, is a book author, had a radio program, and hosted a talk show on Slovenska Televizia (with the great title, Do You Have Something Against That?) that had the honor of being briefly banned for being too controversial.  And writes fine emails.

What I also found out that, thanks to the success of Christmas Goes Baroque, Breiner (who now lives in New York) arranged and recorded two follow-up holiday albums, both a joy -- Christmas Goes Baroque II and A Christmas Choral Spectacular.  (For those interested, the links take you to Amazon.  And you can find the original gem, Christmas Goes Baroque here.)

This is a wonderful selection from the sequel, Christmas Goes Baroque II.  It's a beautiful, and incredibly clever, arrangement of "White Christmas," a song that has been done SO much that it would seem near-impossible to hear it in some new way.  But that's what he does here, arranging the song in the style of Bach's "Air on a G String."