![]() You can feel the winter air on her Sleigh Ride, you can breathe in the roasting chestnuts in her Christmas Song. If it’s a truism that only one who knows despair can know joy, Karen proves it on the happier material. When Karen sings “if only in my dreams,” the pain is more than palpable, it’s exquisite. The pain in that line is nowhere to be found in most renditions. The song is a story with a killer twist of a last line, one that reveals the singer’s promises of returning home for Christmas are lies, mere fantasy – that the only way the singer is going anywhere, alas, is in her dreams. With her dark, melancholy alto, the way she subtly scoops up to her notes, the texture in her voice as it ever-so-softly cracks, and her empathic understanding of lyrics, she fashions a style that feels less like a style than the sound of a human heart breaking. As for the vocals, the spotlight is Karen’s. Various instrumental medleys feature Richard at the piano. The First Snowfall, by Sonny Burke and Paul Francis Webster, Sleep Well Little Children, by Leon Klatzkin and Alan Bergman, and It’s Christmas Time by Victor Young and Al Stillman). Fourteen songs on this set are Great American Songbook entries, several of them uncommon (e.g. ![]() The material demonstrates how Christmas brought out the best in our songwriters. Richard Carpenter here surrounds his sister with orchestral and choral-group arrangements comparable to those one might hear in the glory days of MGM musicals, when Conrad Salinger, Hugh Martin and Kay Thompson worked in that studio’s music department. She had the talent, the affinity for the material, and the wide contemporary appeal to have kept the Great American Songbook flame burning into our present time and beyond. They prove her death was more than privately tragic. That record, along with the follow-up An Old Fashioned Christmas issued a year after Karen Carpenter’s 1983 death, are contained on the 2-CD set Christmas Collection. There is, however, an album containing many examples of Karen Carpenter assaying the Great American Songbook it is the Christmas LP the Carpenters released on A&M in 1978, Christmas Portrait. On most Carpenters albums, her material, with some exceptions – I Can Dream, Can’t I? When I Fall in Love Little Girl Blue – while superior, was of the 1970s and not the Golden Age. Karen Carpenter was the Great American Songbook singer who wasn’t. The Voice of Christmas: Karen Carpenter Posted: Decem| Author: Ted Naron | Filed under: The Great American Songbook | 3 Comments
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