Far Out There Christmas Soundtrack - Alphonse (Patreon)

Okay, Tabitha’s Christmas soundtrack required me to look at things a bit differently and think a bit harder about the song selection. This one, though? This was easy on several levels. For one thing, it’s Alphonse. We already know he likes sophisticated Classical music, and it’s not as if there’s not plenty of orchestral Christmas albums out there. What’s more, I know this because that’s actually the kind of Christmas music I grew up with. In my formative years, the holiday season sounded like Mannheim Steamroller and The Boston Pops, so it wasn’t hard to handpick the tracks for this one. It’s pretty much entirely taken from a set of cassette tapes my Dad recorded off of an Easy Listening station in Atlanta back in the late 80s. So easy AND nostalgic. What could be more Christmasy?

We kick off with a bit of a doozy: “A Christmas Festival” by The Boston Pops (with Arthur Fielder conducting), which is actually a medley of a whole BUNCH of songs. We’ve got “Joy To The World,” “Deck The Halls,” “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen,” “Good King Wenceslas,” “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” “The First Noel,” “Silent Night,” “Jingle Bells,” and “O Come All Ye Faithful,” all within this one track. Yes, with that many songs covered all at once, it’s unavoidable that a few of them are going to appear again later in Alphonse’s playlist, but it’s actually nowhere near as many as you’d think. And yes, covering that much ground means “A Christmas Festival” is NOT a short track. When all is said and done, it’s nearly nine minutes long, more than twice the length of anything else here. But hey, that’s Classical music for ya, right?

Next up we have “Deck The Halls” by The Percy Faith Orchestra, which is one of the few repeat tracks. The arrangement here is pretty different from The Boston Pops take, and NOT for the reason you’d think… if you’re one of the handful of people reading this who know who Percy Faith is. One of the maestros of Elevator Music, the man who best popularized “The From A Summer Place,” you'd think a Percy Faith Christmas album would be heavy on the kitchy 50s department store vibe. And to be clear, MOST of Faith’s holiday music does fit that bill, but not “Deck The Halls.” He got a lot more ambitious with this arrangement on one, giving it a bit of a medieval jig feel. In particular, he creates a sort of “middle eight” section out of one verse by changing it to a minor key and messing with the melody a bit. Compared to how long “A Christmas Festival” is, it’s impressive just how many key changes and arrangement tricks Faith crammed into “Deck The Halls” while still keeping it under three minutes. Most impressive indeed!

We return to The Boston Pops for our next tune: “March of the Toy Soldiers.” It always feels a bit weird that I unquestioningly accept “March of the Toy Soldiers” as a Christmas song, when I otherwise never really think of Babes in Toyland as a Christmas story. Yeah, I know more recent versions include more explicit references to Christmas and Santa, but the ones I saw as a kid didn’t. And yet, I don’t think I’d ever seen any version of Toyland until AFTER I’d already heard “March of the Toy Soldiers” on one of those tapes my Dad recorded, so it was already permanently enshrined in my personal Christmas canon. Funny how that works out.

Next up, we have one of the few tracks here that WASN’T on said tapes, though the man behind it certainly was. Track four is “O Holy Night” by Mantovani. Right up there next to Percy Faith in the Boring Old Grown Up Orchestral Easy Listening rankings, Mantovani did a whole heck of a lot of Christmas Muzak over the years. He’s generally regarded as the innovator of the “cascading strings” arrangement that dominates so much Easy Listening music from the 50s and 60s, though this particular take on “O Holy Night” is a bit more straight forward and Classical leaning, and thus doesn’t feature that trademark sound too much.

Ironically, if you DO want to hear cascading strings in action, hop over to the following track, “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” by Percy Faith. It can be a bit tricky to pick out just how much of the reverberation here is actual echo in the recording chamber and how much is a trick of layers of string sections shadowing each other.  I guess Faith and Mantovani had a bit of a Freaky Friday crossover thing going on when these were recorded.

Next, just to prove that Boston isn’t the only city with an orchestra, Byron Olson brings the Orchestra Manhattan to deliver a version of “The Little Drummer Boy.” The only tune on Alphonse’s whole playlist to actually feature vocals, (well, the only one where the vocals do more than “OOOOoooooh,” anyway) this kind of feels like the opening soundtrack to some kind of big fantasy epic. Like, if the “Little Drummer Boy” special was made by Peter Jackson instead of Rankin-Bass. Also, don’t be weirded out if it seems like the song isn’t playing for the first minute or so. It’s just really, really quiet when it starts. That’s how you know it’s really SOPHISTICATED Classical music.

Mantovani returns with a version of “What Child Is This” that, weirdly enough, sounds as much like Percy Faith as Faith’s version of “Midnight Clear” sounds like Mantovani. The presence of a prominent guitar picking away makes plenty of sense given the history of the song, but nevertheless gives the track a much less stuffy feel than a lot of Mantovani gets accused of being. Gosh, I didn't do a very good job of representing the guy in this list, did I?  Maybe I should have included his version of "The 12 Days of Christmas" instead... except that's even longer than "Christmas Festival" and would have made the whole soundtrack way too long. Eh, whatever.  Let's just say this is Alphonse loosening up a bit for the holidays.

But if the last song was loosening up, then our climactic tune is straight up running around like a little kid: “Sleigh Ride” by The Boston Pops. This is always going to be the definitive version of this song for me, even if it doesn’t have any vocals. The way the arrangement starts playing around with different bass lines around the 2:00 mark is so ingrained into my memory that it just feels weird when other versions don’t do it. Heck, there was a whole set of Gap commercials that just used this portion, it’s that funky. The funny thing, I can see that being Alphonse’s LEAST favorite part of “Sleigh Ride” because it’s getting just a little bit too silly. Not that he’d ever express that opinion, mind you, the little guy’s too polite for that.

Of course, if we’ve just heard Alphonse’s Christmas Playlist, then it stands to reason that everyone should be able to guess what comes next. At least, you THINK you know what’s next…

Alphonse's YouTube Christmas Playlist