Renaissance carols and synth-pop cheer

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MARY REICHARD, HOST: Today is Tuesday, December 9th.

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REICHARD: Coming next on The World and Everything in It: part two of 2025 Christmas albums to season your holidays. And WORLD’s Arsenio Orteza is back with two Christmas albums you probably have not heard — but might end up loving.

ARSENIO ORTEZA: The lutenist Ron Andrico and his wife, the mezzo-soprano Donna Stewart, met in the early 2000s in a small choir that sang for a weekly Latin Mass in Cleveland, Ohio. Since then, under the name Mignarda, they’ve released 19 albums of early music. It’s 20 if you count Stewart’s stunning 2022 a cappella solo disc Veni, Sancte Spiritus: Gregorian Chant Hymns & Sequences. Of those recordings, over a third comprise the kind of Renaissance-era sacred music in which the couple is steeped.

So far this year, they’ve released one album but will soon release another. The album Christe Redemptor: Polyphonic Motets for Lute, came out in June. It’s a program of 10 selections from the 15th and 16th centuries, and, among other things, it’s a fitting introduction to the Mignarda sound.

MUSIC: [“Hodie Christus natus est” by Mignarda]

The duo’s second 2025 release, called In Dulci Jubilo: Ancient Music for Christmastide, comes out on December 18. As its subtitle makes clear, it’s an album of Christmas music. What its subtitle doesn’t make clear is that Christe Redemptor, the Mignarda album that came out in June, was an album of Christmas music too. I asked the couple where they got the idea to do what no recording artist has ever done before: release two Christmas albums in the same year.

ANDRICO: We went into the studio with the intention of making a Christmas album. And we churned out quite a bit of music. And we got in touch with Edgardo, our producer, the owner of the label, and he said, “This is too much music.” And he said, “Why don't we just break them into two albums?” And, you know, that's sort of like a good commercial fix for the idea that we have too much music.

“Edgardo” is Edgardo Vertanessian, the founder of Prima Classic, the label for whom Mignarda has been recording for the past two years. Before entering the classical-music scene, Vertanessian spent a quarter of a century handling live sound for the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Madonna, the Killers, the Who, Lollapalooza, and South by Southwest. In other words, he knows a good thing when he hears it.

STEWART: The real challenge was to figure out what to do, when the first Christmas album came out in March, you know, during Lent. So that was a bit of a challenge to spin. But it's done well. So, you know, Edgardo knows what he's doing.

ANDRICO: The way we approached it was Christmas all year long.

And if Vertanessian’s decision to divide Mignarda’s latest Christmas recordings into two albums is a “good commercial fix,” it makes aesthetic sense as well. Andrico and Stewart placed the 15th and 16th-century Latin motets onto Christe Redemptor and devoted In Dulci Jubilo to more familiar Christmas melodies.

MUSIC: [“Un flambeau Jeanette Isabella” by Mignarda]

ANDRICO: We had a lot of Latin motets that we we loved to perform, but we wanted to couch them in more familiar Christmas songs or Christmas carols so it wouldn't be all one intense experience of, you know, all this polyphony that’s actually quite engaging, but too much of anything is a little—a little wearing. So we wanted to mix it up a bit.

For listeners who’d like to “mix it up” even more this year, there’s a noteworthy new Christmas album that’s not only not by Mignarda but that’s also about as far from the Mignarda sound as possible. It’s Evergreen Melodie: The Christmas Recordings, the latest release by the synth-pop maestro and Evangelical Free Church of America pastor, Ronnie Martin. Evergreen Melodie contains neither Latin polyphonic motets nor familiar Christmas songs. But what it does contain is eight original Christmas-themed compositions featuring Martin’s trademark bouncy pop textures.

MUSIC: [“Evergreen Melodie” by Ronnie Martin]

That’s the title cut, and it’s representative of the album as a whole. The lyrics aren’t theologically oriented. Rather, they focus on the “good will toward men” component of the holiday, with an emphasis on good will among friends and family who depend on Christmas to rekindle their mutual affection. There’s an emphasis on letting nostalgia put one in the “Christmas mood.” One song is even called “Christmas Nostalgia.”

MUSIC: [“The Sound of Snowflakes” by Ronnie Martin]

And this song, “The Sound of Snowflakes,” refers to listening to Nat King Cole and Bing Crosby. When I spoke to Martin earlier this year, I asked him how he manages to write and record so much music in addition to being an author and full-time pastor.

MARTIN: Making music is just part of my routine. So yeah, it kind of fits itself in the midst of everything else I do, and it sort of has to at this stage of life. But it really is something that is constantly kind of pouring out of me. I don’t watch sports. I’m not a handyman, so I do no home projects. I only pay people to do those things. So I think I may have just mentioned 30 hours a week right there that most people spend doing those types of things.

Thirty hours per week times 52 weeks equals 1,560 hours—or 65 days—per year. Martin’s 2025 musical output is a clear example of how much one can accomplish when he sets out to redeem the time.

MUSIC: [“On Christmas Morning” by Ronnie Martin]

I’m Arsenio Orteza.

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