Kurt Elling's brainy holiday album and Frederic Meinders' piano transcriptions

If you run screaming from Christmas muzak that loops endlessly in the malls, then Kurt Elling's holiday album is for you. In characteristically idiosyncratic fashion, the singer sets out to remake and explore the songs, and the spirit, of the season.

The result is a brainiac take on Christmas carols that is, by turns, surprising, warm and rather dark. Sing A Christmas Carol, a musical montage from the 1970 movie Scrooge which yokes together the most famous lines of common carols in counterpoint harmonies, is the opening track that sets the tone for the album. This fractured presentation of traditional favourites is fair warning that Elling is not going to fall into the trap of seasonal schmaltz.

One of the pleasures here is how spiritual the musical exploration turns out to be (not surprising from a former divinity student whose father was a church musician). Listen to The Michigan Farm, where Elling's impressionistic lyrics about a night-time winter scene are an elegant match to 19th-century Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg's slightly sinister Cradle Song Op. 41/1.

Equally intriguing are three experimental, extemporaneous takes on Wenceslaus scattered through the programme like breadcrumbs - just brief wordless snapshots (vocal shots?)of the traditional tune.

  • JAZZ

  • THE BEAUTIFUL DAY

    Kurt Elling

    Sony Masterworks

    4/5 stars

We Three Kings gets a dash of Gregorian chant in the arrangement and souped up with additional lyrics from Tori Amos. Little Drummer Boy borrows some Nawlins marching band strut from drummer Kendrick Scott's sassy work and Elling's relaxed scatting.

The music making is effervescent, which would make even Scrooge believe in the season again.

Ong Sor Fern


These are not new recordings, but no serious lover of piano music should be without these discs. Dutch pianist Frederic Meinders, who is 70 this year, follows in the illustrious tradition of Franz Liszt, Ferruccio Busoni, Sergei Rachmaninov, Leopold Godowsky and Earl Wild in the hallowed art of transcription.

  • OBSCURE CLASSICS

  • THE FREDERIC MEINDERS TRANSCRIPTIONS

    Frederic Meinders, Piano

    Vol. 1 Danacord 671 / 5/5 stars

    Vol. 2 Danacord 687 / 5/5 stars

To date, he has written close to 600 arrangements of a bewildering array of works for the solo piano, many of which are songs. Their vocal lines do not merely get absorbed into piano textures, but are often transformed into something else quite different.

The first volume has groups of lieder by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler, but he does not imitate Liszt. For example, his version of Schubert's Serenade (from Schwanengesang) is for left hand alone. In the Mahler songs, he incorporates denser orchestral textures, but the melody never gets overwhelmed.

The second volume includes the entire 16 songs from Schumann's Dichterliebe (Poet's Love), beautifully rendered, and the first piece of Kinderszenen (Scenes From Childhood), again arranged for the left hand.

His Chopin transcriptions, sometimes combining themes from several pieces in a contrapuntal mash-up, have to be heard to be believed. The single Etude (Op.25 No.7), which Godowsky declined to rearrange, has found glorious fruition in Meinders' hands. Here is pianism at its most inspired.

Chang Tou Liang

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on November 30, 2016, with the headline Kurt Elling's brainy holiday album and Frederic Meinders' piano transcriptions. Subscribe