A String Quartet Christmas (CD review)

Arturo Delmoni and friends. ArkivMusic Listen LSTN 50001 (3-disc set).

Ho, ho, ho. It's that time of year again to love your neighbor, spread good cheer, and buy another Christmas album. I've never understood the latter concept. Each and every Christmas, every record company on earth releases one or more new albums of seasonal music, and all of it seems to sell. Do people go out and buy Christmas music to play once or twice during the holiday season and then lose or throw away that they have to go out and buy even more such discs the next year? I mean, over time people must collect hundreds of Christmas albums, which they tuck away somewhere around the house, never to play again. Seems a waste, particularly if it's music you know people are only going to listen to at certain times of the year.

Anyway, if you must have a new Christmas album, it might as well be one you can hang onto year after year, playing again and again. Or one you can enjoy all year 'round. My wife, for instance, is partial to A Charlie Brown Christmas, which she plays just about any time. With this in mind, you could do worse than A String Quartet Christmas, a three-CD set that producer John Marks originally released on his own label as three separate albums in the late Nineties.

The quartet of the title varies in instrumentation, with two violins, viola, and cello on the first volume, and violins, viola, cello, harp, and organ rotating in and out on the second and third volumes. The idea is to remind listeners of the old, largely nineteenth-century tradition of friends and family gathering together and playing Christmas tunes on whatever instruments they had at hand, with everyone joining in on the vocals. Well, there are no vocals here, but there's nothing stopping you from singing along.

Violinist Arturo Delmoni leads the players in a well-rounded collection of favorite Christmas music: popular, secular, spiritual, and classical. Volume one contains twenty-four selections, mostly of the popular variety--"Joy to the World," "The First Noel," "Deck the Halls," that kind of thing; volume two, with twenty-two selections, is more esoteric and classical--"The Shepherd's Farewell," "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring," "Cherry Tree Carol"; and volume three, with twenty-two selections, is more ecclesiastical--"While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks," "Angels' Carol," "Sleep of the Infant Jesus." The performers include Delmoni on violin; Alexander Romanul, violin; Nina Bodnar, violin; Danielle Maddon, violin; Katherine Murdock, viola; Natasha Lipkina, viola; Ellen DePasquale, viola; Nathaniel Rosen, cello; Rafael Figueroa, cello; Emily Mitchell, harp; and Timothy Smith, organ.

Delmoni's playing style is lively yet warm. In the slower melodies, like "The First Noel" and "Away in a Manger," the performers display an affectionate sensitivity for the music, which seldom strays too far into sentimentality. The additions of a harp in some selections in volumes two and three and an organ in volume three bring an added note of harmony and fullness to the proceedings. Then, too, an unaccompanied harp in six selections on volume three is most affecting.

The sound is fairly close and favors the violin in the first volume especially. The rest of the instruments spread out nicely across the speakers, and the sonics project a broad, smooth response. Although the sound is a tad too soft and plush for my taste, it's well suited to this type of music and probably exactly what most listeners want. The third volume seems to me the best recorded, with an extra dash of transparency to the sound.

JJP