I’ve also ignored albums of sacred songs that happen to include one or two seasonal tunes (see: Vittorio Grigolo, Juan Diego Flórez). Curation is important, as is performance, but the grand unifying principle is simple: Based solely on the album itself, is this a Christmas party I want to go to?Ī few disclaimers: For the most part, I’ve avoided compilations unless they’re the only source of some recordings (such as the case of the Fritz Wunderlich Christmas album). Rather, it’s like being invited to a musician’s house for a holiday party. At its best, a Christmas album isn’t just a haphazard baker’s dozen of carols (though there are plenty of those). This highly scientific ranking attempts to put each singer on even footing with their compatriots. The problem with this mission, as it turned out, was that classical singers’ holiday albums are a little like Japanese mascots : Just when you think you’ve accounted for all of them, you learn that there’s a stoat wearing an acorn for a hat representing a ski resort in Nagano, and then you realize that every ski resort needs to be examined and how the hell do you compare a one-eyed bird whose head is sandwiched between two hamburger buns with an anthropomorphic hard-boiled egg that sprinkles itself with salt ? That changed a few months ago, when I decided the best thing for my mental health as we entered another pandemic wave would be to assemble every opera singer’s Christmas album and listen to it for the purposes of ranking them. It’s a good thing, too, that Spotify stops tracking my listening data in late October for its annual Wrapped feature, usually well before I start to play certain albums on repeat: the Vince Guaraldi Trio, the Robert Shaw Chorale, Sharon Jones, Sufjan Stevens, Bob Dylan… Yet, despite both a love of Christmas and of opera, I’ve tended to shy away from listening to opera singers’ Christmas albums. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that I love Christmas as much as Kanye loves Kanye. But the wisdom of our memes is in the simile and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the internet’s done for. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, the particulars of Kanye’s love for himself.
The register of my joy at this time of the year is secured by the glühwein, the television specials, the tree markets, and the carols.
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