Divine Art is delighted to present Sacred Joy, a live recording capturing a special LIEDER ALIVE! Christmas concert at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Belvedere, California, in which lyric soprano Esther Rayo and renowned pianist and conductor Peter Grünberg presented a programme of carols both familiar and surprising.

For Rayo, this repertoire is close to her heart as she grew up singing in church, and her early experience of carols as lived joy shapes every phrase. Sacred Joy takes Rayo’s church foundation and broadens it, weaving in the Latin American heritage that runs through her artistry, so that the evening becomes as much a personal statement as a seasonal one, and a superb celebration of Christmas.

The concert opens with a seasonal favourite Adeste fideles / O Come, All Ye Faithful, before Praetorius’s seventeenth-century Es ist ein Ros entsprungen / Lo, How a Rose. Then follows Gruber’s Stille Nacht / Silent Night and Adam’s Cantique de Noël / O Holy Night, and despite their nineteenth-century grandeur, Rayo colors each phrase with a restraint that makes the climaxes, when they arrive, beautifully genuine.

At the centre of the programme sits a detour into Bach-Gounod’s Méditation (Ave Maria), threaded over the First Prelude’s familiar arpeggios, followed by the Fugue that completes it, with Peter Grünberg given a moment alone at the keyboard before Schubert’s own Ave Maria returns the focus to voice. Then the recital takes a somewhat magical turn to the south and west, with the Puerto Rican El santo niño / The Holy Child, the Mexican lullaby El rorro / The Baby Christ Child, and the Spanish A la nanita nana / Little Lullaby, repertoire close to Rayo’s own artistic identity. Irving Berlin’s White Christmas closes the programme, a fitting final gesture in an evening built on the idea that the sacred takes many forms. Rayo delivers this with an unaffected, tender simplicity and naturalness rarely heard from a highly trained classical voice.

This recording arrives a year after Rayo and Grünberg’s acclaimed Estrellita (DDX 21145), a collection of Spanish and Latin American song that received deserved applause from critics. Gramophone praised Rayo’s “warm, sweet tone and silky-smooth legato,” while Textura singled out the “warmth, lustre, and smoothness” of her voice and the authority of her interpretations. Sacred Joy extends that partnership into devotional territory, and the rapport built over years of collaboration, nurtured through LIEDER ALIVE! under Founder/Director Maxine Bernstein, is audible throughout.