''A Christmas Cornucopia'' is the fifth studio album, and the first

Christmas album Christmas music comprises a variety of genres of music regularly performed or heard around the Christmas season. Music associated with Christmas may be purely instrumental, or, in the case of carols or songs, may employ lyrics whose subject ma ...

, by Scottish singer-songwriter Annie Lennox, released in November 2010. It was Lennox's first album after signing to the

Universal Music Group Universal Music Group N.V. (often abbreviated as UMG and referred to as just Universal Music) is a Dutch– American multinational music corporation under Dutch law. UMG's corporate headquarters are located in Hilversum, Netherlands and its ...

( Island Records in the UK,

Decca Decca may refer to: Music * Decca Records or Decca Music Group, a record label * Decca Gold, a classical music record label owned by Universal Music Group * Decca Broadway, a musical theater record label * Decca Studios, a recording facility in W ...

in the US and Canada) following her departure from Sony BMG, which had been her label for almost 30 years. The album is a collection of Lennox's favourite Christmas songs, though includes one original track written by Lennox, " Universal Child", which was released digitally as a single on 12 October 2010. A music video for Lennox's version of the classic Christmas carol "God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen" premiered on 4 November 2010, which was released as the second digital single from the album. A tenth anniversary special edition of the album was released on 20 November 2020 including a new recording, "

Dido's Lament Dido's Lament is the aria "When I am laid in earth" from the opera ''Dido and Aeneas'' by Henry Purcell ( libretto by Nahum Tate). It is included in many classical music textbooks on account of its exemplary use of the passus duriusculus i ...

Reception

Metacritic Metacritic is a website that aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted average). Metacritic was created by Jason Dietz, Marc ...

gives ''A Christmas Cornucopia'' a weighted average score of 73 based on 9 reviews, meaning "generally favorable reviews". Ian Wade of

BBC Music BBC Music is responsible for the music played across the BBC. The current director of music is Bob Shennan, who is also the controller of BBC Radio 2, BBC Radio 6 Music, and the BBC Asian Network. Officially it is a part of the BBC's Radio ...

gave the album a very positive review, saying "this collection could find itself becoming as much a part of the holiday season as arguments with loved ones." Sal Cinquemani of '' Slant Magazine'' awarded the album 3.5/5 and said "Lennox seems more inspired on A Christmas Cornucopia than she has in years." John Hunt of ''Qatar Today'' magazine gave the album 9/10 and said "in particular, the vocal work and musical arrangement of 'God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen' are impactful to the point of being intimidating."

Track listing

Commercial performance

As of January 2011, ''Christmas Cornucopia'' has sold 179,000 copies in United States.

Personnel

*Annie Lennox – accordion, African drums, African percussion, arranger,

dulcimer The word dulcimer refers to two families of musical string instruments. Hammered dulcimers The word ''dulcimer'' originally referred to a trapezoidal zither similar to a psaltery whose many strings are struck by handheld "hammers". Variants of ...

, Fender Rhodes, flute,

harmonium The pump organ is a type of free-reed organ that generates sound as air flows past a vibrating piece of thin metal in a frame. The piece of metal is called a reed. Specific types of pump organ include the reed organ, harmonium, and melodeon. Th ...

, keyboards,

marimba The marimba () is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars that are struck by mallets. Below each bar is a resonator pipe that amplifies particular harmonics of its sound. Compared to the xylophone, the timbre ...

, orchestral arrangements,

pan pipes A pan flute (also known as panpipes or syrinx) is a musical instrument based on the principle of the closed tube, consisting of multiple pipes of gradually increasing length (and occasionally girth). Multiple varieties of pan flutes have bee ...

, percussion, piano, pipe organ, producer, reed organ, santur, string arrangements, triangle,

vibraphone The vibraphone is a percussion instrument in the metallophone family. It consists of tuned metal bars and is typically played by using mallets to strike the bars. A person who plays the vibraphone is called a ''vibraphonist,'' ''vibraharpist ...

, vocal percussion, vocals, whisper, whistle,

Wurlitzer The Rudolph Wurlitzer Company, usually referred to as simply Wurlitzer, is an American company started in Cincinnati in 1853 by German immigrant (Franz) Rudolph Wurlitzer. The company initially imported stringed, woodwind and brass instruments ...

*Dave Robbins – conductor * Mike Stevens – arranger, bass, drones, engineer, glockenspiel, acoustic guitar, nylon string guitar, keyboards, mixing, music box, orchestral arrangements, organ, Hammond organ,

oud , image=File:oud2.jpg , image_capt=Syrian oud made by Abdo Nahat in 1921 , background= , classification= * String instruments *Necked bowl lutes , hornbostel_sachs=321.321-6 , hornbostel_sachs_desc=Composite chordophone sounded with a plectrum , ...

, African drums, producer, programming, string arrangements, strings *Barry Van Zyl – African drums, percussion *The African Children's Choir – vocals ;Technical *Matt Allison, Marcus Byrne - engineer *Heff Moraes - mixing, mixing consultant *Mike Owen - photography

Charts

Weekly charts

Year-end charts

Certifications

Release history

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Christmas Cornucopia, A Annie Lennox albums 2010 Christmas albums Christmas albums by Scottish artists Decca Records albums Island Records albums