Very English Christmas

Tenebrae is an amazing group of voices. Their Latin medieval chants are absolutely lovely. It is hard to review this Christmas music CD as their singing is excellent. What makes the CD more targeted to a specific audience is the overly complicated arrangements, which are not only dissonant at times but make it hard to understand the words. If you speak English or American you should be able to follow the songs and hear the lyrics. I think the audience who would most enjoy this is the BBC Evensong crowd who is not religious in anyway but just like the modern new compositions and cutting edgy artistic arrangements of historically better composed music. Singing the original arrangement would have made the CD a 5 star. Its just too much to listen to the entire CD at one time, maybe rotating with other less helter-skelter classical music.

Maybe I have no idea what English Christmas music sounds like, but I was pretty disappointed by this MP3 album. I don't think I'll be playing it again.

A refreshing, inspiring change from the usual Christmas fare.

Excellent

Beautiful music. I recommend it to anyone who likes beautiful music.

Everything was fine.

One of the best Christmas albums ever!

Divine.

……evocative and atmospheric.

Tenebrae are great. Xmas is great. Recording is not.

Definitely a high quality collection of Christmas music. Very well sung as you would expect from Tenebrae. Some really nice arrangements on here too which I'd not heard before. The highlight for me on this disc is the arrangement of "There is no rose of such virtue" - absolutely fantastic.However, I'm not giving this 5 stars as the disc suffers from a lack of variety - it's all relatively similarly paced, similarly harmonied, and some texts are treated more than once. And honestly, why is "tomorrow shall be my dancing day" sung SO slowly? It's more a funeral march than a joyous dance!Anyway - well worth it for anyone looking to add something new to their Christmas carols selection.

My husband loved this. Excellent CD.

Beautifully sung and charming selection