Your Daily Dose of Christmas (and Tone Poem Tuesday!)

It's pretty clear that in this series I've stretched the definition of "Tone Poem" to "Any orchestral work that isn't actually a symphony", and hey, I can do that because it's my blog. So here's an orchestral suite of extracts from Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Christmas Eve. This music has nothing at all to do with any traditional Christmas music that we've all come to know, but hearing something new is always good, right? Rimsky-Korsakov's operas are almost completely unknown in the West today, which is a shame. They all deal -- like Christmas Eve -- with Russian folk stories and legends, which tend to be likewise less than well-known in our land.