The timbre is mostly there but the flexibility is so compromised and the repertoire is really staid. (I’m an unabashed “O holy night” hater, though her multilingual “Silent night” is sweet.) But over the years I began to find something so ineffably lovely about the way she sings that folksy Italian Christmas standard. It’s not big and grand like some of the other settings on the album, no huge orchestra or overblown organ to make her seem small. It’s really just the lady and her zampogna singing a lullaby to Baby Jesus. While Leontyne‘s “Angels we have heard on high” is, in my opinion, the most beautiful 90 seconds of music ever recorded, Tebaldi’s gentle “Pastorale” is for me a wonderful example of that subgenre unique to each of us, performances we grow to recognize the beauty in and alongside which we chart our own development as listeners and lovers of music.