Opera North Christmas Gala – Dewsbury Town Hall

Conductor: Garry Walker

Chorus Master: Anthony Kraus

Youth Chorus Master: Nicholas Shaw

Christmas has come to Opera North, and they are celebrating in style with their annual Christmas gala.

Founded in 1977 as an offshoot of the English National Opera based in Leeds, Opera North “creates extraordinary experiences every day, using music and opera to entertain, engage, challenge and inspire”.

They continually innovate, explore and radicalise opera for a 21st-century audience, championing diversity, expanding audiences and introducing the young to opera.

The annual Gala at Dewsbury Town Hall, certainly reflected the companies ethos, with even the youngest audience members singing along with festive smiles.

Starting with Duke Ellington’s The Nutcracker Suite, the jazz adaptation of the festive ballet, is wonderful. The work fizzes with Ellington’s typical energy, and the tantalising glimpses of Tchaikovsky’s melodies breaking through the tension and swing of jazz brought a delightful familiarity to what may be a less familiar setting. The section is topped off with a series of virtuoso performances by members of the brass and woodwind section, and in the final March Peanut Brittle Brigade, the orchestra is smiling.

There are also hints (though assuredly not part of the original intent) of the Northern colliery bands peeking through in the more brass-heavy sections, that brought another layer of nostalgia to proceedings.

Nostalgia is certainly the watchword for the next section, which set some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poems from The Land of the Counterpane to a selection of music by Howard Blake (he of Walking in the Air compositional fame), and for which the Opera North Young Voices fill the rows behind the orchestra. They sing beautifully, and with few hints of nerves despite their tender years.

The versatility of conductor Garry Walker is on display through this collection of short songs; where he is previously angular and vibrant in the preceding jazz suite – springing up and down on the podium, seeming to conduct as much with his lower half as his arms – here he is reassuring, patient, a fixed point coaxing the chorus onward.

The selection is charming, highlights include the assured harmonies on Where Go the Boats?, and From a Railway Carriage. The title piece, performed first as a sort of overture with the words spoken, is revisited in a choral setting at the end, and could stand alongside any beloved piece of music in an old-fashioned children’s show.

After the interval, the Yuletide music begins in earnest. The majority of the orchestra is cleared away in the interval, and the seven-piece band left behind – brass, rhythm section, and piano – is dwarfed by the excellent Chorus of Opera North.

They open with a trio of familiar carols – We Three Kings, God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen, and I Saw Three Ships – but in distinctly unfamiliar arrangements. Gone are the traditional harmonies and choral settings, and in their place three rather spiky jazz arrangements by Will Todd. It may be a deliberate counterpoint to the opening section of Ellington’s music, but it is mildly jarring – the Nutcracker tunes are made more exciting by their settings, but here it feels alienating, an intellectual removal of the original meaning.

However, this is a minor nit to pick, and the glorious Chorus soon plant us back into familiar choral territory with the not-heard-often-enough 15th Century Adam Lay Ybounden. Next a rather sweet new piece, La Ciaramelle, written by Peter Longworth, leads us to In the Bleak Midwinter, from whose dying lines conductor Walker wrung every last drop of pathos.

Then it is time to put down the last dribble of ice-cream, rise to our feet, and indulge our fantasies that secretly we are all Opera North-quality singers just waiting to be discovered, as the singalong part of the evening begins with Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. From there, it is what we might roughly term the ‘greatest hits’ all the way, as a choral version (that we are permitted by the conductor to hum along with) of Silent Night led into Good King Wenceslas and O Come All Ye Faithful.

Then, because even the largest Christmas pudding needs a sprig of holly on top, Leroy Anderson’s irresistible Sleigh Ride brings the evening to a close, as the silly-hat-bedecked Chorus and Orchestra (kudos to the singer wearing the roast turkey balaclava, it looks brutally hot) meets the rapturous applause and whoops from the audience before the last note dies away.

Opera North are the antithesis of elitism and exclusivity that so often isolates the classical world; great music, delivered well, with a place for all to listen.

Reviewed on Friday 16th December 2023