Patrick O’Donnell penned this review.
If you looked up the word ‘ethereal’ in the oversized leather-bound dictionary in the Green Man library, you’d probably find the following definitions:
1. light, airy, or tenuous: an ethereal world created through the poetic imagination of the Fey.
2. heavenly or celestial: Orion’s ethereal home.
3. the vocal and instrumentals stylings of Loreena McKennitt.
Her haunting blends of folk, world music and Celtic have been entrancing listeners since her 1985 debut album Elemental. A Midwinter Night’s Dream, her 10th release, is no exception.
Midwinter is a collection of 13 traditional holiday tunes — Christmas carols, if you will — that, in classic McKennitt style, have been re-imagined through the inclusion of Celtic, Middle Eastern and New-Age influences.
The end result is a bit like eggnog that’s had coconut or chocolate added: the classic base is still there, but the flavor’s been altered just enough to turn the holiday classic into a new drink.
And if you’re anything like me, a re-imagining is just the thing to make holiday music enjoyable again — especially here in the States, where stores start cranking out the same worn-out Christmas jingles before the last Halloween jack-o’-lantern has been extinguished.
Take McKennitt’s arrangement of the first track, ‘The Holly and the Ivy.’ It’s a song often heard accompanied by piano, brass or strings. While she includes cello, violin and viola, she also mixes in the tabla, hurdy gurdy and guitar synthesizer for a classic McKennitt sound that makes this time-honored tune feel exotic and otherworldly.
The second track, an all-instrumental version of ‘Un Flambeau, Jeannette, Isabelle’ (‘Bring a torch, Jeannette, Isabella’; often performed as ‘Christmas Day in the Morning’) gets a very Celtic makeover with the inclusion of a bouzouki and accordion.
Later, McKennitt takes the hymn ‘Emmanuel’ back to its Latin roots for a very somber rendering that seems almost at odds with its hopeful, more oft- heard English lyrics (‘Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel shall come to you, O Israel!’)
By far my favorite, however, is her arrangement of ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’ with Algerian musician Abderrahmane Abdelli. Eastern influences are evident from the opening strains as Abdelli chants to the accompaniment of the mandola before the tabla picks up the beat. Later the shawm, cello and violin set the verses swaying like a snake charmer and a cobra.
Some of the material on this album won’t be new to McKennitt fans. Five of the songs are from her 1995 release A Winter Garden. And not all of the material will appeal to listeners who aren’t fans; some find her New-Age stylings so different and so soaked with emotion that they verge on melodrama.
Not me, though. I’ll be putting this CD into the regular holiday rotation. Like the Apple commercials said, different is good.
Especially when it comes to holiday music.
(Quinlan Road, 2008)
