A Winter's Solstice- Windham Hill Artists

A Winter's Solstice II The Winter Solstice series from Windham Hill is an appealing souvenir from the label's early days, when guitarist Will Ackerman still served as its chief guiding light and fount of original thought. For years Ackerman shunned the overt commercial trappings of traditional Christma...	A Winter's Solstice IV In 1993, Windham Hill Records released its fourth album of seasonal music recorded by the label's artists and unavailable in any other collection. Only a few of the tracks on A Winter's Solstice IV lend credence to the label's unfair stereotype as the home for new age background ...	A Winter's Solstice III	A Winter's Solstice V	A Winter's Solstice VI
A Winter's Solstice: Silver Anniversary Edition Since the Windham Hill imprint's Winter Solstice series was born in 1985, the concept has gone through some changes, bottoming out with 1999's abysmally kitschy Winter Solstice on Ice. With this Silver Anniversary Edition, Dawn Atkinson, who produced the first Winter Solstice dis...	A Windham Hill Christmas The songs are familiar carols, but A Windham Hill Christmas retains the Windham Hill Winter Solstice series tradition of unusual arrangements and performances that evoke the mood of the season, especially if your take on that mood is a Northeast, snow-covered landscape, like that...	A Windham Hill Christmas: The Night Before Christmas Windham Hill holiday albums are a staple of the Christmas season and they say peace, tranquility and good will to all like few instrumental offerings. Usually played on acoustic guitars and pianos tuned to a slight new age bent by musicians who have come to define the Windham Hil...	Windham Hill Christmas II	December, Piano Solos: 20th Anniversary Edition December holds the distinction of single-handedly putting Windham Hill on the map and being the new age album most likely to find its way into music collections of all ilk. In spite of being relentlessly overplayed during the holidays, the solo piano recording has aged quite well...

a must have!
if you are a Windham Hills fan (and even if you are not), this collection is possibly the best album they've produced. every song is beautiful and truly relaxing, whatever the season... definitely not just a holiday album.

Best Solstice
I believe this is the best of the Solstice series. The "Greensleeves" interpretation is very unique. I like it. What makes this a great CD is the overall quality of the music.

Excellent CD
This beautiful acoustic CD by Windham Hill is one of my favorites. Several musicians (William Ackerman and Mark Isham among them) take the solstice and midwinter as a theme for its pieces. It's very moody and relaxing, and it suggests, to those of us living in the Southern Hemisphere, the winter in the Northern Hemisphere. There are two pieces which have a "Christian" theme in it (a retelling of Bach's Jesu, Joy of Man's desiring by David Quadley and a theme called Christmas on the High Line), but it mostly suggests to me the ancient pagan past in Northern Europe, the fresh snow over the beech forests as the pale sunlight of the midwinter gives way to the starry night, and the local folk erect a bonfire.

Music and Memory
Windham Hill has certainly milked this series for a very long time based on the success of this album in the 1980s. Many of its successors are really very good, but this is the seminal Windham Hill artists' statement about music, memory, and seasonal sentiment. Most of the cuts on this album are so well crafted that they may seem simplistic, but what is so telling for me is that the pieces hold up year after year and they possess a magical quality that allows the music to become a part of one's Solstice/Christmas experience. Will Ackerman's "New England Morning" is especially moving in this sense, and certainly seems to capture something elemental about New England in winter. This quality of the music is a tribute to the pure artistry of the performers/composers. Winter's Solstice II also works well on this level of grace and harmony. While the albums that follow the first two are good in many ways, and certainly contain high quality performances, the series sets a high standard with the first two attempts that is very tough to match. Highly recommended at any price.

a soundtrack to a vanished past
In the early months and years of my first marriage, this music was the bridge between two people who were not accustomed to building bridges. The emotional resonances that it triggers in me even now make me wonder whether music should be trusted as a reliable means of communication. The answer is, of course, yes; I just have to learn to remember without regret. Five stars, and more. The first, and probably the best, of the Solstice records.