Upon a Winter’s Night

Cara Dillon

Because Dillon specializes in traditional folk songs, she puts across the eight selections that she and Sam Lakeman didn’t write with a comfortable intimacy. That’s “comfortable,” by the way, as in “comfort and joy,” not “lazy”; her singing and the acoustic instrumentation that accentuates it bear the marks of careful planning and execution. Meanwhile, the Dillon-Lakeman originals “Mother Mary” and the title cut could almost pass for hoary folk standards themselves. Only “Standing by My Christmas Tree” breaks the mood and even then only ever so gently.

A Symphonic Christmas

Melbourne Symphony Orchestra/Melbourne Symphony Orchestra Chorus

It’s not often that a high-quality Christmas album’s highlight is a recitation of “The Night Before Christmas,” let alone one recorded before an arts center audience that has already had its spirits primed by 50 minutes’ worth of rousingly rendered carols, spirituals, and sentimental favorites. What sets this recitation apart? The orchestra’s clever use of snippets from “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town,” “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” “Clair de Lune,” “Autumn Leaves,” and “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” to keep the audience on its toes.

In Winter

Katie Melua

Melua obviously doesn’t intend this gorgeous album’s generic title as an anti-Christmas gesture. Assisted by the Gori Women’s Choir, she begins with “The Little Swallow” (aka “Carol of the Bells”), ends with “O Holy Night,” and includes Rachmaninoff’s “Nunc Dimittis” and the Romanian carol “Leganelul Lui Lisus” in between. “Winter” merely grants her access to a broader range of sentiments. And whether those sentiments come from herself, Joni Mitchell, or the Georgian folk canon, Melua’s singing suggests that she has pondered their meanings in her heart.

Still Shining

Andy Park

Park calls this album a “worship project.” Notwithstanding its unfaltering focus on the Bethlehem event, “worship project” isn’t the only possible descriptive label. It’s also exemplary pop-rock—even Scrooges will have a hard time resisting the hooks and rhythms. What “exemplary pop-rock” won’t prepare listeners for is instrumental versions of “Joy to the World” and “What Child Is This” that nod toward John Fahey and a variety of instrumentation that, like the album as a whole, gets more impressive (and feels more worshipful) with each listen.

Encore

Ray Stevens spends most of his latest Christmas album, Mary and Joseph and the Baby and Me (CabaRay), reaffirming his status as a hammy cornball (or is that a “corny ham”?). Between his impersonations of the grandpa whose wife got run over by a reindeer and the kid who only wants his two front teeth, his impersonation of a declawed cat imploring Santa to make him whole again (with Santa claws, get it?) is a high point.

On several songs, however, Stevens abandons his shtick, and twice the risk pays off: First, on the title cut (imagine T.S. Eliot’s “Journey of the Magi” as written by a donkey and set to “Willie and the Hand Jive”). Second, on “Merry Christmas,” which declares a moratorium on tolerating intolerance toward everything from public acknowledgment of the Founding Fathers’ Christian faith to wishing people anything more specific than “Happy Holidays.”