Christmas 2025

Greatest Hits Christmas will contain three decades of festive recordings, celebrating Rimes' enduring love for the holidays. There will be fan-favorite classics, standout tracks from Rimes' beloved holiday catalog, and three new recordings. The record will feature her breakout holiday single "Put a Little Holiday in Your Heart," songs such as "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and poignant gems from her It's Christmas, Eve soundtrack, chronicling Rimes' evolving relationship with the season as an artist and as a woman.

On her upcoming album Cuban Christmas, Sarah Willis, horn-player of the Berliner Philharmoniker teams up with the Sarahbanda. Together they inject the colourful, contagious energy of Cuban music into a selection of timeless holiday classics. The album further includes works by Bach and Tchaikovsky – these too reimagined with Cuban flair. “Cuban Christmas is a celebration of culture, connection, and the music that makes the season magical,” says Willis. “I truly hope it brings as much happiness to your home as it brought to mine while creating it.”

Feminine Voices celebrates the female voice and the Christmas season, with a kaleidoscopic selection made up of the Magnificat, Ave Maria and carols, each of which is more wonderful than the last. Eight female composers feature in the programme that Christopher Lowrey and the singers of the Altera ensemble have devised, with works by Hildegard von Bingen, Imogen Holst, Germaine Tailleferre, Cecilia McDowall, Joanna Marsh, Barbara Strozzi, Elizabeth Poston, and a world premiere by Kerensa Briggs. Male composers are also included, with works by John Rutter, who has written many Christmas carols, and Benjamin Britten's famous Ceremony of Carols, a work now generally performed by boys' choirs but which was originally written for the women of the Fleet Street Choir. The version recorded here is Britten's original: "seven Christmas carols for women's voices and harp! Very sweet and full of charm". Altera and the harpist Li Shan Tan perform this magical and spellbinding music with delight.

Christianity in all its forms excels through its high degree of adaptability. We encounter one of the more fascinating examples of adaptation in Latin American Catholicism that developed in the colonies of "New Spain". Not least did the veneration of Mary find especially receptive genius loci here, whose musical disposition soon wedded to an artistic concept that was the non plus ultra for the rulers of the Old World. For some composers, the transatlantic regions thus had such appeal that they abandoned their traditional sphere of activity. One of them was the Italian Ignacio de Jerusalem, who worked at the cathedral in Mexico City; he was joined by the Mexican "home-grown talent" Manuel de Sumaya as well as two Spanish musicians who were only known and beloved in the land of the Aztecs only for their printed works - this yields a truly exquisite mix for Christmas.