11/16/01

Reviewed by Maureen E. Daly

This book is so beautiful you’ll feel you have to buy it as a gift -- and then you won’t want to give it away!

The CD has 25 Christmas carols recorded by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Chorus, Philadelphia’s St. Francis de Sales Boys Choir, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir and others. It is 75 minutes of what I would agree are the best secular and religious Christmas songs - - and by that I mean no repetitive, saccharine Rudolph and Frosty. In the songbook each carol’s sheet music and lyrics are set on one page for ease in actually singing them with friends and family.

Last is the book of art and essays, which ids a work of art itself. There are many full-color reproductions of Nativity and Epiphany paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens and lesser-known artists whose works you will recognize from holiday cards.

Clancy chose art works that were created at the same time as the songs. So "LO How a Rose Ere Blooming," written in the 15^th century, is illustrated with a page from the Saltzburg Missal, a rare book in the Bayerische Staatsnbibliothek in Munich, Germany. This 8-by-10 reproduction can be examined here more closely than would be possible even if you could hold the actual missal in your hand. Clancy chose the illuminated miniature painting "The Tree of Jesse," which shows the Madonna and Child as the flower at the tip of a swirling tree that sprouts from the chest of the sleeping Jesse. This book is full of such wonders.