Last Friday, we presented our Christmas programme at Symphony Hall, Birmingham with the mighty CBSO. The orchestra were in excellent form, as always, and we noticed one or two surrepticious groups of musicians gathering around large cardboard boxes during the break in rehearsals. With the humour and fun we have come to expect from the orchestra, during the performance many members were kitted out in outlandish Christmas paraphernalia but several had gone the whole mile. The secret contents from those boxes were now visible to all, and included a life size moose, a snowman/lady and various other large seasonal costumes. How they managed to continue playing their instruments when visibility must have been severely limited we will never know!
As ever on theses occasions, the audience lapped it all up. It felt a bit like ‘end of term’ anarchy had set in, but a lot of fun was had by all. Thank you to the orchestra for getting into the spirit. Even Richard imparted not one but three Christmas cracker jokes to the audience.
We singers really enjoyed ourselves. The programme has a lot of close harmony work which we all enjoy immensely. The down side of Christmas programmes generally is that there is naturally a small three week window of opportunity to perform them, so for a programme as vocally complex as this one is, it takes it takes longer to get up to speed than with other programmes we can perform throughout the year. Huge thanks to Mary, Emma and Maurice for all their hard work, and a hope that we will remember it all for next time! GB
“an excellent evening, great arrangements, and the singers were all marvellous…” Stephen Maddock, Chief Executive, CBSO
