With It's Christmas!, tenor Jonas Kaufmann delivers something for almost everyone, except perhaps fans of traditional classical holiday repertory: there are standard carols in German and English, traditional German tunes including dialect pieces in which Kaufmann seems quite comfortable, a French carol that calls forth a hitherto unknown voice from the tenor, and, probably controversially, a concluding sequence of American pop songs accompanied by the Cologne Studio Big Band, including, believe it or not, All I Want for ...
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With It's Christmas!, tenor Jonas Kaufmann delivers something for almost everyone, except perhaps fans of traditional classical holiday repertory: there are standard carols in German and English, traditional German tunes including dialect pieces in which Kaufmann seems quite comfortable, a French carol that calls forth a hitherto unknown voice from the tenor, and, probably controversially, a concluding sequence of American pop songs accompanied by the Cologne Studio Big Band, including, believe it or not, All I Want for Christmas is You. Other tunes are accompanied by the Mozarteum Orchestra or simple plucked accompaniments. One may be tempted to assert that Kaufmann has, in fact, delivered something for almost everyone not to like, but it's worth giving him a chance and accepting the album on its own terms. The unifying conceit is that the pieces are a personal collection from Kaufmann, and that's believable enough: the album has a flavor of trying to put a personal stamp on a wide variety of...
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