Christmas Carols: From Village Green to Church Choir

This new album, bringing classic carols to life under the expert direction of conductor and author Andrew Gant, is released in advance of the publication of Mr. Gant’s new book of the same name “Christmas Carols, from Village Green to Church Choir”. In Christmas Carols Andrew Gant tells the story of some twenty carols, each accompanied by lyrics and music, unraveling a captivating - and often surprising tale of great musicians and thinkers, saints and pagans, shepherd boys, choirboys, monks and drunks, delving into the history of such favorites as ‘Good King Wenceslas’, ‘Away in a Manger’ and ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, discovering along the way how ‘Hark, the Herald angels sing’ came to replace ‘Hark, how all the welkin ring’ and how Ralph Vaughan Williams bolted the tune of an English folk song about a dead ox to a poem by a 19th c. American pilgrim to make ‘O little town of Bethlehem’. Christmas Carols, a fittingly joyous account of one of our best-loved musical traditions, brims with anecdote, expert knowledge and Christmas spirit.