Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

In O Holy Night, her debut as a Sony recording artist, 10 year old soprano Jackie Evancho provides a thrilling, if altogether too brief, glimpse of her genuinely startling vocal ability. O Holy Night is an EP/DVD consisting of 4 Christmas songs as well as a separate disk containing videos of her journey through America's Got Talent last summer, along with a brief interview with Jackie. The music selections include outstanding versions of Pie Jesu, Silent Night and Panis Angelicus. But the standout track - the one I keep playing over and over in fact - is the title track O Holy Night. The arrangement builds though the song almost to the point of being pretentious, which might be problem were it not for the fact that her vocals are more than up to the challenge. Her voice shimmers - and in fact it soars with surprising power. More importantly, she brings an interpretive gift to the song far beyond her years. When Jackie sings a song like O Holy Night, it is as though she is really singing the story of the birth of Christ to us - and it is her talent as a storyteller which really comes through. Listen as she proclaims the word "proclaim"! I have seen vocal gifts like this before, but never in a child - and in fact altogether too rarely in Jackie's chosen field of classical crossover. If there is one concession to her age in her vocals, it is that she does have to take more breaths than an adult singer might. Her remarkable interpretive ability more than compensates. Putting all of this together, Jackie Evancho is already among the best singers in her field Apart from Jackie's vocals, I was tempted to downgrade the actual product because it was too short. The videos included on the performance DVD only included the actual performances, without judge comments and at times with even the applause cut short. I would have liked to have seen the entire performance segments as well as alternate footage, such as the judge reactions while she was singing. But at the end of the day, I couldnt bring myself to downgrade Jackie merely because I wished there was more Jackie. A great debut from a terrific young performer.