This piece isn’t performed by the Canadian Brass, even though it’s titled “A Canadian Brass Christmas Suite”. Nevertheless, it’s pretty cool.

A few Christmas selections by Yo Yo Ma (and whichever friends he brings along)!

Here’s one I play each year in acknowledgement of Christmas’s way of making us think, amidst the joy and light and gift-giving, of the loves that might have been, the lives we might have lived, and the dreams that sometimes we barely remember dreaming.

The United States military is home to some really good musicians, and they do a lot more than just play “Hail to the Chief” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever”.

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.