The Choral Society shares it with the public on Thursday, Nov. 8 at the Telluride Gallery of Fine Art, 130 E. Colorado Ave., from 6 to 8 p.m. The album's executive producer and Choral Society Artistic Director John Yankee will be on hand to put the record in the pipeline, as they say in the industry. Also on-hand will be Doug Margetts, the Los Angeles record producer who provided the state-of-the-art digital recording equipment the WinterSing project was made with.

The WinterSing CD is in many respects a family affair. Doug Margetts is the older brother of Telluride Elementary School teacher and WinterSing Chorale member Amy Van der Bosch. Last fall at the initial WinterSing rehearsals, Yankee asked singers if they knew of anyone who may be able to help them in the recording process. Van der Bosch thought her brother might be willing to lend some valuable advice. "The next thing I knew was I was at a rehearsal and John announced that my brother was coming out himself do the recording," Van der Bosch says. "Never in a million years did I think he'd come and do it himself. I though he'd perhaps steer them in a particular direction."

It was the first time she had worked with her older brother, and the first time in a long while she was able to spend time with him. Van der Bosch was only five when Margetts went off to college. The WinterSing CD was not only a brother-sister effort, but a quick study of the CD insert and its roster of performers yields more than one mother-daughter pair, and David Lamb, a singing father with two singing two daughters.

One of these pairs is Andrea Benda and her daughter, Hamilton Sims. They have been singing together since the inception of the Choral Society six years ago. Hamilton sings by herself in the opening strains of the recording's seventh cut, The Christ Child Lullaby. Benda said she was listening to a rough cut of the CD on a recent exceptionally sunny day from her home overlooking Bear Creek "I was sitting on my deck and heard Hamilton's voice and started crying," she recalls. "I thought how blessed I was to be raising my child in such a beautiful place and have the opportunity to make music. I was thinking I must have the most charmed life ever." For Benda, The Christ Child Lullaby has strong emotional ties. She was in Scotland years ago and discovered the song when browsing through a children's songbook of Gaelic folk tunes. She added it to her personal collection of Gaelic songs, and often sang it around Telluride during the holidays with a group of friends. She says that Gaelic songs are especially poignant because it the language was driven underground when Scots were persecuted and even imprisoned for speaking it. When he decided on doing a Celtic program for WinterSing 2000, Yankee wanted to include the song he'd heard Benda sing around town. "John asked me to come in and teach the Gaelic words to the girls, and having Hamilton sing the opening is just icing on the cake for me," Benda says.

The new WinterSing CD will give her a fresh round of Christmas gifts for several relatives who have become accustomed to listening each year to mother and daughter singing on a cassette recording of WinterSing 1995, Benda says. That was the year the Choral Society did its first recording, engineered by Cindy Choice, who now owns Wizard Video.

"It came out beautifully, but a cassette recording was all we could afford at the time," Benda says. Each Christmas she says she gets calls from relatives expressing their delight in hearing the recording once again.

WinterSing on CD is a collection of 19 songs from last year's A Celtic New Year production. The prelude "I Saw Three Ships" is performed by bagpiper Greg Hanshaw, who also closes the CD with a postscript called "Kilworth Hills."

The CD effectively captures WinterSings' signature sound. WinterSing programs often mix rarely heard international ballads with jigs and traditional songs that Yankee often arranges himself, resulting in a flavor unlike traditional Christmas programs. One such ballad on the new album is "Christmas in the Trenches," a melancholic song for solo voice and piano, performed by Yankee. It tells the story of one Francis Tolover, a World War I soldier from Liverpool who recounts the Christmas Eve when he and other English soldiers slowly crossed the frontlines over to where the Germans were singing Christmas carols, joining them in song and sharing chocolates, cigarettes and pictures from home, even playing soccer together. The next morning, with great remorse, the soldiers return to opposite sides of the front to continue fighting.

Good King Wenceslas is performed with great enthusiasm by the children's choir, WinterSing's youngest performers. This version of the popular classic is elevated by the excitement in the kid's voices, coupled with a simple but memorable guitar accompaniment by singer-writer Sara Hendrix.

The pairing of Ulli Sir Jesse's Irish Harp with Laura Lake's pennywhistle on Sou Gon is achingly beautiful. The sweetness of WinterSing's youngest voices alongside the instrumental duet is something that happens only occasionally in music: an alchemy that causes a song break free of its attachment to tempos, key signatures, measure lines and other markings on paper.