The Complete Music of Christmas
You know a Christmas album is classic when it gets re-recorded in stereo five years after its initial release. You know it's an all-time classic when that re-recording hits the charts a full five years after its initial release. And you know it's downright legendary when the record company goes to the trouble of giving a subsequent Christmas album the same name a full seven years after its initial release under a different title. There's only one
Christmas album (or one album, period) that fits all these criteria: Percy Faith's 1954 masterpiece, The Music of Christmas. Majestic, sumptuous, overpowering...the superlatives flow easily when describing this recording, which
brought the arranging, orchestrating and conducting prowess of the young maestro to bear on some of the most beloved hymns and carols of all time. Yet, the original mono recording of this holiday essential and its iconic cover art has NEVER been issued on a legitimate CD until now (the 1959 stereo re-recording, which charted in 1964, has never gone out of print, and ranks #1 among Christmas albums at the Christmas music site The Yule Log)! Even better, we've added three mono holiday-themed singles from the 1950s as a little stocking stuffer to wind up disc one. Disc two presents the original stereo version of the 1958 release Hallelujah!; a Christmas classic in its own right, it shows what holiday magic Percy Faith could wield in the stereophonic realm. That album was re-named The Music of Christmas Volume 2 in 1965 (hence the title of this collection); we offer it here with its original 1958 cover art. Both albums feature a brand-new remastering by Maria Triana at Battery Studios in NYC that just leaps out of the stereo, and come with new liner notes. 29 tracks of holiday favorites at their orchestral zenith!