On the second day of Christmas I like to settle in and enjoy some Christmas music. Actually this year I have jumped the gun and have been listening to it for a while.
I sell Christmas records in my Etsy shop but there were a couple I could not quite part with. One was Joan Sutherland's Christmas album, including this witty and marvelous take on "The Twelve Days of Christmas."
Do people still remember Joan Sutherland? I am so grounded in the '80s because those were the singers I grew up with and loved. Joan Sutherland was a big diva back then and she was married to Richard Bonynge who conducted this glorious Christmas record that I could not find it in my heart to sell on Etsy. It is not as if people would be lining up to buy it anyway and there I would be having to not play it and keep it perfect. That was what I told myself anyway.
Joan Sutherland also does a number on "O Holy Night." That is a song for tenors and sopranos, you know? You do not normally find mezzos or baritones singing it.
I have a kind of guilty soft spot for "O Holy Night." Leonard Pennario did too and I think of him, still, when I hear it. Yesterday I heard the great Leontyne Price singing it and I thought of Pennario double because he noted in his diary that he went to hear Leontyne Price sing and later he went backstage to greet her. He was a fan.
When I was a kid Leontyne Price WAS opera. No grand occasion was complete until they brought her out. But that is another story for another day.
For the Third Day of Christmas, perhaps!
We are just beginning.
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