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Prompt service, flawless condition, for my favorite arrangement of Christmas music by the great Robert Shaw.It's the meaning of Christmas for me.
This has been one of our favorite Christmas albums over the years. Robert Shaw was the greatest American choral conductor; Robert Russell Bennett was the arranger and orchestrator of some of the greatest broadway musicals including Oklahoma., The King and I, My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, and Camelot. We recently performed these pieces as a part of our annual Christmas concert, and the response was overwhelming. People enjoy these renditions of traditional carols that are both classic and innovative. Together they are a winning combination. Highly recommended.
I also have the newer Telarc CD of the very same material. There are two almost identical versions of "The Many Moods of Christmas" this is the first 1963 recording. I have to say I was looking forward to getting this original recording. The quiet parts are loud and the loud parts just get painful, shrill and unlistenable. This CD is sad and I wish I could return it and not just throw it away. I remember the vinyl as being quite good and many early analog recordings are spectacular.
The dynamics are changed so radically on this remastering that there is no reason to buy it. There is a 1990 recording of the same material and arrangements on the Telarc label. I know others have hinted that the original is better musically but I'd have to get a copy of the original on vinyl and haul out the old turntable to know. I suspect this was spectacular before the digital remastering engineers at BMG/RCA got a chance to "improve" it. The program is sadly compressed to death. Maybe one day the 1963 master tapes will be revisited by musical engineers and we'll all be able to hear the 1963 version as it was recorded with depth and musical dynamics.
Atlanta. Although technically oriented, I've avoided any attempts at comparison of vinyl vs.
I first heard this magnificent product - on vinyl - at the time of it's original release in 1961 ( there seems to be some confusion among Web-sites about when it was first produced, but I remember it being 1961). That particular year had been a difficult for me as a teenager so the Christmas holiday had held little interest - that is until Christmas Eve that year when I played this album.
I was stunned to find this Album still existed and had been re-mastered and transferred to CD, and that so few reviews had been written about it. As with another Reviewer, from that day on my Christmas would begin and end with the playing of this wonderful "Present".I still have that original Album (now safely stored away with a turntable to play it on), in the certain knowledge my children - and their children - will hear it again in all it's original majesty, and along with others I too have searched every Christmas for another album that might equal this - and have found none.
In an instant, with it's first chords, my inner darkness was wiped away and I was swept up in the grandeur of the moment. I would listen to the entire recording that evening in total, rapture.
CD, or the RCA Symphonic vs. All such attempts lose sight of what was sought and so masterfully achieved - creation of something that was meant to stir and lift up the very soul of the listener, and this it has done repeatedly through out my lifetime, as I hope it will yours.
I've bought a ton of Christmas albums over the years, trying in vain to find something as good as this. Powerful. I set up my old record player just to play this album this Christmas and it was worth it. My father bought this LP when I was 15 and played it on his Heath Kit stereo. If you're disappointed in this album you're from another planet. Just magnificent.
I just play them over an over.
No go.
This album is the antidote to weenie Christmas records by pop stars who can't really sing.
It wowed us then and it still does.
Lots of quiet passages but Shaw knows how to sneak into full tilt.
This is a BIG orchestra with a BIG string section, with a BIG sound and a BIG organ, backed up by a BIG chorus.
There are four passages that still bring tears to my eyes when I turn the volume way up which I always have to do.
I'm buying the CD to replace my skipping record because I cannot live without this album.
It DEFINES Christmas music.
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