🎄JOSEPH’S OPERA STAR CHRISTMAS LISTENING PLAYLIST

For me, it’s simply not Christmas without these few essential listens from opera stars. I wanted to share them with you this year!

SOME HIGHLIGHTS:

You’re messing up if you don’t give Anne Sofie von Otter’s entire Christmas Album a listen this year - it’s so weird and all over the place but well done and somehow touching? I’m into it. The tracks i’ve selected here are favorites but there’s no way to fully represent the weirdness of the whole thing. It’s going to be hard for tomorrow to be her dancing day with all that mixed meter.

Gheorghiu in English is never not a delight, and her Adeste Fideles should be taught as vowel modification porn.

Dame Kiri nails some Christmas cultural appropriation.

Renee scats over holiday elevator jazz in The Man with The Bag?? and duets with Rufus Wainwright in a somehow successful In the Bleak Midwinter

BUT THE QUEENS OF CHRISTMAS FOR ME ARE

LEONTYNE - this luxury Bach track gets me every time, she sings it like a violin solo - her vibrato throbbing. it’s so gorgeous.

KATHLEEN - Mary Did You Know with Christopher Parkening, Gesu Bambino

and JESSYE - TWO FULL ON CHRISTMAS ALBUMS fully arranged, fully produced, full choir, full orchestra. These are MASSIVE undertakings and they’re so cool. The transitions from song to song on the THROUGH COMPOSED Christmastide album alone are worth it.

I think the real takeaway here is that we have somehow lost the art of arrangements and we need to get that back ASAP. Arrangers are the unsung heroes of Christmas, you heard it here first.