St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra - A Festival Of Christmas: An Orchestral Celebration
STYLE: Hymnody RATING OUR PRODUCT CODE: 8443-8185 LABEL: Kingsway KMCD2504 FORMAT: CD Album ITEMS: 1 RRP: £2.99
Reviewed by Simon Carpenter
Another Christmas, another bland orchestral rehash of much loved seasonal musical favourites, this time by the St Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra who should know better. Well, maybe it's not all bad. There are some nice moments in their version of "Angels We Have Heard From High" (“Angels From The Realms Of Glory” to you and me), but I just think that great tunes such as "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" and "Silent Night" deserve better than this, and have been given it by such as Hely Hutchinson in his Carol Symphony. Alongside the usual suspects ("Joy To The World", "Hark The Herald", etc) are four tracks from the archives (and one or two are definitely showing their age) of other orchestras' recordings of Christmas classics: Bach's "Sheep May Safely Graze" and the "Sinfonia" from his Christmas Oratorio, and two extracts from Handel's Messiah, the "Overture" and the "Pastoral". With their demonstration of what real classical music is, these tracks, quite frankly, rescue this CD for me and move it into the OK category.
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