A Welcome Novelty Seasonal music from Naxos, reviewed by PATRIC STANDFORD Naxos    8.570331

A new CD of seasonal music has a welcome novelty value that could perhaps give it a life beyond December, though that clearly will be its greatest commercial relevance. Its window dressing is rather unbalanced. The name and photo of Stephen Fry is prominent, as also is the title in which he features as narrator, though that is only six minutes of a disc of more than an hour, and on which undoubtedly the major track is a fantasia on The Twelve Days of Christmas by Doreen Carwithen, adapted by Philip Lane from a film soundtrack she created in 1955 for On the Twelfth Day, a short comic film without dialogue. Carwithan was a clever composer, the second wife of William Alwyn, an equally proficient film composer, and devised a sequence of instrumental interludes to punctuate choral verses from the old celebratory carol [listen -- track 12, 15:36-17:16] and which she brings to a close with neatness and skill [listen -- track 12, 18:37-20:12].

The rest of the CD is entertaining though not of great consequence, and yet Philip Lane (who has co-produced the disc for Naxos) features notably as an expert arranger and orchestrator. His arrangements of Leopold Mozart's Classic Sleighride, an Overture on French Carols and a delightful little piece -- Sleighride to Thredbo [listen -- track 7, 0:42-1:18] by the Australian composer John Carmichael, now a British resident and approaching 77, make a distinctive contribution. It is in fact Philip Lane as composer that gives the CD its title, and his pleasant score supporting Stephen Fry's characteristically efficient recitation of the amusing 19th century verses by one Clement Clarke Moore, give it, as does Fry, more that it deserves -- but it is, after all, for Christmas [listen -- track 5, 0:58-2:37]!

The work of other arrangers contribute to this anthology: the hand of Syndey Baynes assists Coleridge-Taylor's Christmas Overture and Anthony Collins extracted four pieces from Liszt's Christmas Tree Suite in his version for strings and celeste. The BBC Singers, in addition to their contribution to Doreen Carwithen, appear in Nicolai's Christmas Overture, based on the chorale von Himmel hoch, and there is the attractive Last Sleep of the Virgin from Massenet's La Vierge with cello soloist Matthew Lee. It's all the sort of thing that Barry Wordsworth and the Concert Orchestra do so competently.

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