Seasonal delights

The Ghosts of Christmases Past, Present, and Future haunt every year’s seasonal musical offerings, but this year those ghosts seem busier than usual.

From the past, there’s Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s 265-year-old Magnificat in D major (Wq 215). It has received both a new performance from the RIAS Kammerchor and the Akademie fur Alte Musik Berlin under the baton of Hans-Christoph Rademann (Harmonia Mundi) and a reissue of the somewhat slower late-’80s performance by the Rundfunkchor Berlin and the CPE Bach Kammerorchester, Hartmut Haenchen conducting (Brilliant Classics).

Both albums contain performances of other C.P.E. Bach compositions. But it’s the title masterwork that anchors each. Short of Handel’s Messiah, there exists no more liturgically faithful, gloriously rousing, full-length work celebrating the Word’s becoming flesh.

From the recent past, two recordings bearing 2013 copyrights deserve honorable mention. The 20-voice Sursum Corda’s Welcome, Yule! Choral Favorites for Christmas (MSR Classics) touches popular bases (“Angels We Have Heard on High,” “Silent Night,” “Deck the Halls,” even “Jingle Bells”). But it also exhumes and restores Anton Bruckner’s long-neglected 19th-century gem “Virga Jesse Floruit” and Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s even longer-neglected 17th-century, four-movement Messe de Minuit pour Noël.

As for the Irish vocal ensemble Celtic Thunder and its accompanying 90-piece orchestra, their 2013 Christmas Voices has been bought up by Sony, trimmed of one song, and rechristened as Holiday Symphony.

Obviously, anyone who bought last year’s edition need not buy it again. But newcomers will thrill to Celtic Thunder’s bright, crisp renditions of “Oh Holy Night,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Away in a Manger,” “O Come All Ye Faithful,” Handel’s “Comfort Ye,” and the Medieval Latin carol “Gaudete.” The inclusion of songs of more recent vintage does not detract from the overall sense of awe. What does, if only a little, is the replacement in the title of “Christmas” with the tiresomely generic “Holiday”—there’s not a Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, or Winter Solstice cut among the lot.

Where the present is concerned, there’s abundant cause for rejoicing, not least of which is The Spirit of Christmas (Sparrow/Universal). Credited to “Michael W. Smith & Friends,” it manages to be all things to all people in the fullest sense of that venerable Pauline expression.

Smith doesn’t slight Santa or other secular aspects of the holiday’s cultural components. Indeed, he leads with them (“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year,” “Happy Holiday/Holiday Season,” “White Christmas” [with Lady Antebellum]). But from the London Symphony Orchestra’s mid-disc medley of “Deck the Halls,” “Good King Wenceslas,” “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful” onward, it’s sacred all the way. Unifying both halves, and tethering the whole to the past, is a hushed, prayerful recitation by U2’s Bono of the 17th-century Irish carol “The Darkest Midnight” (a.k.a. “On Christ’s Nativity”).

Then there’s the future. As always, it’s intertwined with the past and the present, yet somehow something else altogether and therefore somewhat shrouded in mystery. Winter Chants (Edel) by the German group Gregorian captures, or has perhaps been captured by, just such a mood.

Juxtaposing the sacred (“Ave Maria,” “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring,” “O Holy Night,” “Away in a Manger,” “Coventry Carol”), the secular (Emerson, Lake & Palmer’s “I Believe in Father Christmas”), pop (Cliff Richard’s “Mistletoe and Wine”), and the semi-discordant (Don McLean’s “Vincent,” Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”), the album creates a hauntingly spectral mishmash in which the battle of flesh vs. spirit spirals hauntingly outward—to be resolved, apparently, at a later, almost certainly apocalyptic, date.