Anyone who has been exposed to Carl Orff's music teaching methods will find this all very familiar. Gunild Keetman's Christmas Carols bear the hallmarks: simple melodies, fundamental rhythmic patterns and very basic diatonic harmonies. This is the kind of stuff which has been echoing through school corridors by their thousand. It's great fun to perform; after all that's the essential purpose of it. But for the passive listener it offers nothing demanding and can be (especially when there are 14 of these carols all in one go) a very monotonous experience. The dividing line between what is almost magical in its innocence (''Was tuat denn der Ochs'' is a delightful example) and what is embarrassingly naive (''Es sungen drey Engel'', for example) is not only very finely drawn, but frequently crossed here. I don't think the overall effect is helped by a children's choir so well-drilled and polished as this. Only ''Von der Geburt des Herrn'' (the most recently recorded item) sounds as if it is sung by real live children.
Carl Orff's own Christmas Story is more of an aural experience than a serious musical work. Here an exotic array of percussion accompanies three (very self-conscious) boy narrators, with small musical interjections in the shape of some traditional carols sung by a chamber choir, and some purely instrumental interludes from a fascinating ensemble of medieval instruments (although this latter's effectiveness is stifled by the utter crassness of the music they are given to play). The recording superimposes some ghastly sound effects; a field of bleating sheep, dogs barking, cows mooing and wind howling. All very evocative I'm sure, but sounding awfully false to me. Musically uninspired, it is not made any more attractive to non-German speakers by the absence of a translation and by some omissions from the printed texts. The thick accents of the narrators are at times impenetrable. But praise must go to the engineers who have produced exemplary digital transfers from these elderly recordings.'