Christmas music and stories belong to the Advent season as much as the Christmas tree and all the decorations belong to Christmas. »Ein Wintermärchen« (A Christmas Fairy Tale) combines popular German Christmas carols and texts to form a very special literary and musical programme. The Berlin arranger, composer and pianist Christoph Israel has enlisted the services of soloists like Daniel Hope, Albrecht Mayer and Elisabeth Breuer and the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, and tailored tasteful orchestral arrangements of German Christmas carols to suit them. The musical numbers are interspersed with texts by Loriot, Robert Gernhardt, Bertolt Brecht and Erich Kästner, who cast a humorous and critical glance at our Christmas traditions. read less