Taverner Consort, Andrew Parrott - Christmas Carols (4CD BoxSet) (2007)

This box set, called Christmas Carols, includes all four discs originally released between 1987 and 1995 by Andrew Parrott and the Taverner Consort: Festive Music from Europe and America, Nine Centuries of Seasonal Music, and The Carol Album I: Seven Centuries of Christmas Music, plus its sequel, The Carol Album II: Seven Centuries of Christmas Music. The 66 pieces here mostly come from The New Oxford Book of Carols edited by Parrott and Hugh Keyte, and, as can be seen from the disc titles, they cover all of shape and manner of what might very loosely be termed Christmas carols. There are carols for choir, for soprano, for guitar, for organ, for brass, and for what sounds like a consort of sackbutts; carols from early America by William Billings, from sixteenth century Venice by Giovanni Gabrieli, from thirteenth century France by anonymous, and from a tenth century nunnery by Hildegard von Bingen; carols you've heard all your life, like the traditional "God Rest You Merry Gentlemen," and carols you've never heard before in your life, like Anton Webern's Dormi Jesu. But no matter what, every track on all four discs proves surprising and every performance proves charming. Recorded in warmly atmospheric and very immediate digital sound, fans of recherché Christmas music will be delighted by this four-disc set.