City of Glasgow Chorus: Christmas Cracker

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 21/12/25

City of Glasgow Chorus, City of Glasgow Concert Orchestra, Paul Keohone (conductor)

On the afternoon of Sunday 21st December in Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall, The City of Glasgow Chorus teamed up with the City of Glasgow Concert Orchestra, under the direction of Paul Keohone, to present a ‘Christmas Cracker’, a basket of goodies for the festive season.  The chorus numbers over 70 singers and performs from a wide repertoire.  So far, it has been my pleasure to report on their performances of Verdi Requiem, Bach Magnificat & Vivaldi Gloria, and Haydn ‘Creation’, so for me ‘Christmas Cracker’ represented a different genre of their music-making to experience.  The orchestra’s designation denotes a selection of musicians from the professional Scottish orchestras, including the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, as well as some prominent freelancers, chosen (to match the requirements of the programme) by the supremely talented native of Kilmarnock, composer/arranger/singer/entertainer/organist Gordon Cree.  As at least 4 of the programme items boasted orchestrations by Gordon, and the conductor Paul also hails from the same Ayrshire town, I suggest, as a subtitle for the ‘Christmas Cracker’ feast of goodies, not without a side order of tongue-in-cheek, “Killie Pie”.  Turnout at the GRCH was very impressive – evidently Glasgow knew that whatever was on the menu, it would be cooked to perfection.

First out of the hamper was ‘Christmas Fantasy’, a medley of seasonal melodies by Gordon Langford, whom I associate with brilliant arrangements for the King’s Singers in the 1970s.  Included were ‘It Came Upon the Midnight Clear’ (with a lovely a cappella bit), ‘In Dulci Jubilo’ (as a student of Latin in my youth, I will always wince at the mispronunciations inflicted on the scholarly ear by churchmen). ‘Unto us is born a son’, ‘Angels from the Realms of Glory’, ‘Ding Dong Merrily on High’ (stylish instrumental with great brass writing and the choir singing in the chorus only), ‘The First Noël’ with piano accompaniment only (the wonderful Lynda Cochrane dotting back and forth between the piano and celesta all afternoon), its climactic second verse interpolating ‘Gloria in Excelsis Deo’ in the brass before a big finish.   After enthusiastic applause, Paul Keohone genially welcomed the audience and introduced the first of four (and a bit) audience participation numbers: ‘O Come all ye Faithful’.  Each punter on entry had received two sheets of A4, one with the programme, the other a sheet of lyrics.  My regular readers can predict what I am going to say next. Yes, the lights in the auditorium were dimmed.  Now, whilst my infant nickname may have been ‘Owlie’, that was more a reference to wide-eyed wonder at the world, and never denoted being endowed with night vision.  Enough said (or it would be if this issue ever got fixed). 

Mac Huff’s wonderful arrangement of Adolphe Adam’s ‘O Holy Night’ was next.  After a brief introductory reference to the melody of ‘Silent Night’, the arrangement is a very lovely lilting sicilienne and it received a charming outing.  It was followed by the first Gordon Cree arrangement of the afternoon, ‘Mary’s Boy Child’, featuring nice answering between the choral parts, little oblique quotes from ‘O Holy Night’ and the imaginative use of piccolo and celesta in the orchestral texture.  Lovely.  Introducing the first fully a cappella number of the programme. Paul Keohone mentioned that this is his 4th year as Music Director of the chorus and “they just get better and better”, adding that he hoped so, as the next item would test them.  David Willcocks’ arrangement of ‘Tomorrow Shall be my Dancing Day’ was delightful, a smidgeon of downward drift in the pitch of the sopranos entirely inconsequential and ignorable. 

A purely instrumental rendition of Leroy Anderson’s ‘Sleigh Ride’ was a thrill, with a slapstick for the whip and woodblocks for the clip-clop in the percussion, and a jazzy romp for the last verse.  Equally crisp but even more delightful was John Rutter’s ‘Shepherd’s Pipe Carol’, with exquisite lightness of touch in the syncopation and the irregular metre of the ritornelli, a dreamy third verse and lovely answering between the parts in the fourth verse, ensuring its place as my earworm of the afternoon (and still now as I type).  More audience participation (almost forgotten by the conductor/compère)  followed in the form of Mendelssohn’s ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’.  Next up was a rare treat: Elgar’s ‘The Snow’ for women’s voices, two violins and piano.   Lynda Cochrane was joined by a pair of virtuosi from the front desk of the violins, Feargus Hetherington and Gillian Risi (when Gordon Cree hand-picks a band, he does it properly).  Delicious Elgarian melancholy tempered with a consolatory major key interlude – excellent.  The wonderful Ray Charles’ arrangement of ‘Jingle Bells’ (a major fave of my own choir, ClacksChoral) benefitted from Gordon Cree’s imaginative orchestration and was fabulous (though I reckon we make more of the ladies’ “Right!” answer to the gents’ “making spirits bright”).  The first half concluded with John Rutter’s arrangement of ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’, with the audience chiming in with “five go-old rings” as required.  Good clean fun.

After the interval, Mark Hayes’ super arrangement of Meredith Wilson’s ‘It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas’ received impressive crispness of diction in the triplet patter verses, whilst a jazzy link and key change built the big band sound for a Hollywood-style big finish.  Excellent.  Introducing the next audience participation number, Paul spoke of his ‘Health and Well-being Through Song’ lifelong learning classes in Strathclyde University on Thursdays, beaming at the front row of the audience, occupied by the whole class of over-50s.  Then we all sang ‘The First Nowell’.  An evergreen Ukrainian a cappella modern classic next, in the form of  Peter J. Wilhousky’s arrangement of Mykola D. Leontovich’s tripping ‘Carol of the Bells’.  Always a joy.  A more leisurely prayerful triple metre permeates another modern classic, John Rutter’s exquisite ‘Nativity Carol’, in the same arrangement that Clackmannanshire Choral Society favours, with an a cappella verse and a gorgeous descant near the end, but with strings as accompaniment.  It was magical.  Introducing the celebrated instrumental Russian melody which followed, the ‘Troika’ from Prokofiev’s ‘Lieutenant Kijé Suite’, Paul Keohone revealed that the orchestra had had only one 3-hour rehearsal that very morning.  They sounded fabulous, though expecting just two cellos to carry that great tune is a tall order.  This was the only time all afternoon that I felt the sparseness of the string instrumentation against the double winds and brass, plus 3 glorious horns.  We also had harp, piano and celesta, timpani, tubular bells, xylophone and glockenspiel at the arranger’s disposal, as well as a drum-kit and an assortment of untuned percussion.  Nevertheless all, notably bassoons, trombone, piccolo and saxophone, sounded great in the Prokofiev. 

Part of the audition process that led to Paul Keohone’s appointment as Music Director of the Chorus involved rehearsing the choir in Morten Lauridsen’s 1997 a cappella motet ‘O Magnum Mysterium’ and that was what we heard next, with Lynda Cochrane’s piano imperceptible at first but more present at the second climax.  Music of exquisite stillness, it was the most moving piece of the concert, not an earworm but unforgettable nonetheless.  The audience was hauled to its feet again for the last official tutti, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’. The programme concluded with three ingenious Gordon Cree arrangements/orchestrations.  The first of these, for the male voices with orchestra, was ‘When a Child is Born’, a Ciro Dammicco melody popularised by Johnny Mathis and others.  Leslie Bricusse’s lyrics and John William’s music received the Cree treatment with ‘Merry Christmas’ from ‘Home Alone 2’, in a full Hollywood bells-and-whistles number.  The printed programme concluded, as it had begun, with a medley, Gordon’s own ‘Yuletide Medley’.  Featured, after a brief intro, were a lovely arrangement of ‘The Christmas Song’ (Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire), a swing version of ‘Winter Wonderland’ with a nice xylophone part, a stylish arrangement of  ‘Christmas Waltz’, ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, ‘White Christmas’ and a coda fashioned from ‘Jingle Bells’.  Super. 

“D’ya wanna dance?”  “Yes!”  “C’mon then!”  The impromptu encore, from the year I started secondary school, was Slade’s 1973 ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, with audience in the chorus, bringing the festive romp to a close in full “bonkers but brilliant” mode.  A ‘cracker’, then?  Absolutely