Though pianist
Jeffrey Biegel's name is above the title in Koch's Classical Carols, arranger Carolyne M. Taylor is the responsible party for arranging 21 Christmas carols in the style of 21 other classical composers, utilizing, in many cases, their most familiar works.
Biegel had recorded Taylor's arrangements before for the PianoDisc, a digitized, playerless grand piano that one may have encountered in department stores, shopping malls, and hotels, and convinced Koch to record a similar program for buyers of ordinary audio CDs. This is the same concept that propelled Delos' popular Heigh-Ho! Mozart, a disc of popular Disney melodies arranged in the manner of well-known classical composers, a practice that
Krzysztof Penderecki has called "living in the style of another." At the outset, it should be said that for non-specialist consumers looking for a stylish and distinctive CD of Christmas carols that has a warm, cozy, Christmas-y feeling, then Koch's Classical Carols might well be perfectly fine. This is as long as one has no more than a glancing familiarity with classical music itself and is not offended by instances where a transformative treatment -- short of the violent lampoons of
Spike Jones, whose irreverence is often their best defense -- is taken to something that is familiar and, in some cases, revered.
That said, for those who do reserve for works like
Debussy's Clair de lune a special privilege, then Taylor's transformations are not going to seem "transformative" enough. Taylor's trope of "Silent Night" into the sound of
Debussy is flanked by the opening and closing sections of the original, which, apart from some measure of facilitation for ease of playing, appears practically unchanged. This is Taylor's modus operandi for the balance of the disc, or at least it seems to be as far as one can stand to make it through. It is as though the mother bird has not chewed up the worm enough for her young, leaving them to choke on the "bleeding chunks"; listeners deep into classical music will find it similarly unpalatable. This is not a charge that can be leveled against Heigh-Ho! Mozart, which took the time to fully digest the style of the composer in question before applying it to the Disney version. Listeners located in the middle of the equation, being neither expert nor wholly out of sorts with classical music, might feel that Classical Carols sounds a little too much like a piano in a shopping mall.