With the advent of music's digital availability, listeners are often told to sample before they buy. However, that is not such a good idea for this Christmas release by pianist Martin Stadtfeld. Brief samples will give the wrong idea of what his music is all about. It seems more "crossover" than it is. In one respect, it is the tonality: his music is absolutely conventional, and that has been enough for Sony Classical to market him successfully as a vaguely crossover figure. Stadtfeld's music does not aim for comfortable familiarity, though, and this becomes clearer in the familiarity-valuing genre of Christmas music. For one important thing, he writes a good deal of his music himself. Here, he arranges Christmas tunes for piano and contributes an 11-movement suite called Christmas Time, depicting the holiday through his own childhood eyes. It is vivid and really not sentimental. His arrangements are all about register and texture, and they defamiliarize the music he takes up. Sample (if one must) the Two Variations after Praetorius' "Es ist ein Ros entsprungen" for an idea of what Stadtfeld is about; his arrangements of traditional Christmas music are really all variations of one sort or another. It's rare to find a Christmas album that meets the requirements of the holiday but delivers something entirely fresh, and Stadtfeld has done it here.