The Cleveland, Ohio early music group Apollo's Fire has specialized in Baroque music but has released several albums devoted to American folk repertory and its Celtic roots, and with Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain (an actual place in the Appalachian mountains) it enters the holiday album field in that vein. The shift isn't really as great as it may seem: what is thought of as Celtic folk music has actually been transmitted to the wider world through various kinds of arrangements, and an 18th century European audience would ...
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The Cleveland, Ohio early music group Apollo's Fire has specialized in Baroque music but has released several albums devoted to American folk repertory and its Celtic roots, and with Christmas on Sugarloaf Mountain (an actual place in the Appalachian mountains) it enters the holiday album field in that vein. The shift isn't really as great as it may seem: what is thought of as Celtic folk music has actually been transmitted to the wider world through various kinds of arrangements, and an 18th century European audience would have been comfortable with the fiddles, lutes, and pipes heard here. (The hammered dulcimer, of course, would have been new.) The arrangements are varied and have a magical quality, and the end result is something like an American version of Jordi Savall's investigations of folk repertories. The program is divided into six sections -- "Christmas Eve at the Crossroads," "Celtic Memories-Christmas Eve in Old Ireland," "Caroling Across the Waters," "Christmas Morning in Appalachia,"...
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