Artist: Mantovani
Album Title: Mantovani Orchestra Performs Christmas Classics
Genre/Style: Classical
Release Year: 2010
Mantovani has been dead for thirty years, but like Tupac, he keeps putting out records. As best I can tell, he and his famed orchestra only released two Christmas LPs in his lifetime, but there have been many collections since. I settled on Mantovani Orchestra Performs Christmas Classics primarily because it was a manageable length. A few of these tracks — “I Saw Three Ships” and “The Twelve Days of Christmas” — were part of the annual Christmas mixtape that defined my childhood, but the rest are new to me.
Everything on the album is majestic. Sometimes that quality doesn’t really fit, like on “The Holly and the Ivy”, a song that was never meant to be sung with such bombast. And over time, you might get the feeling that you’re celebrating Christmas in an Italian restaurant. But there’s no denying the quality of the musicianship. Sometimes you want mellow and sometimes you want enough sound to fill the Hollywood Bowl. This album is for when you need the latter. Mantovani is usually identified with easy listening, but this is not elevator music. It is symphonic, and it is wonderful.
Rating: 
I suspect you’ll get more or less the same impact from any of the other Mantovani Christmas collections, depending on how much time you want to spend with the orchestra.
