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A Christmas Overture by John Rutter. Rutter is mainly known for his melodic and lyrical choral music, but this is quite nice. (Rutter will likely turn up again this month.)

I love John Williams, obviously, but I do have to admit that I prefer his music to have a darker tinge to it. When he gets into full-on “happy” mode, I find that…well, it’s like eating a very rich and very sweet dessert. A little goes a long way.

This is a suite someone cobbled together out of several Christmas-related tracks from Williams film scores. And just in case you need some “darker” Williams after that, well, go to YouTube and dig up any track from Revenge of the Sith. That should do it!

One of my every-year favorites. Here is Tchaikovsky’s Suite from The Nutcracker.

In Generations, the first Star Trek movie to feature the cast of The Next Generation, the plot involves an evil scientist whose goal is to do whatever he needs to do to get back into “the Nexus”, which is some kind of alternate dimension where wishes are fulfilled or some such thing. The whole thing doesn’t make a lot of sense, but late in the movie Captain Picard finds himself there, and his temptation to remain is a Very English Christmas that looks like something out of one of the rich family scenes in a Dickens novel. Not much to write home about, really, but Dennis McCarthy’s scoring of this dream-like sequence is interesting ethereal.

I don’t know anything at all about the band Sixpence None the Richer, but I gave a random listen to their rendition of my favorite Christmas hymn, “Angels We Have Heard On High”, and…well, hear it for yourself. I quite fancied it.

Baroque composer Arcangelo Corelli wrote this wonderful concerto grosso and inscribed it: “Made for the Night of Christmas. It’s not known exactly when he wrote it; it survives because of its publication in a posthumous collection of all of Corelli’s concerti grossi. In a concerto grosso, the music alternates between being performed by a group of soloists within a larger ensemble and by the entire ensemble itself. At this point in music history the concerto had not yet developed into a showpiece for soloist with orchestra.

There are no familiar Christmas tunes here, but I always find that the intimate sound of various chamber ensembles lends itself to the more peaceful and contemplative aspects of Christmas.

It’s December, so here we go with our daily roundup of Christmas favorites old and new!