Snowmen, Santa and Serious Music: RSNO Christmas Concert
The Royal Scottish National Orchestra Christmas concert puts the audience participation into classical music across the country
I'm in my 18th year of attending the RSNO Christmas concert. This is, for me, a deeply serious and spiritual tradition that also happens to feature a lot of cheesy audience participation and a group of adult men who play classical trombone for a living dressing up as penguins.
They’ve tried to experiment with the programme over the years, but always come back to the tried and tested formula. For me it’s like watching an episode of a TV show I love so well that I can recite the punchlines along with the actors. During the first half they screen The Snowman, play the music, and ask a group of 200 children to sit still on stage for half an hour and sing for just three minutes. Then in the second half there’s more action for the choir, more Santa hats, and they might even throw the orchestra a bone and let them play a couple of pieces of serious music.
I have attended in every permutation, across every city, timeslot and concert hall they're willing to put it on. I can break down the character of each individual audience – the Glasgow matinee is, if you can believe it, pretty noisy and the punters have a tendency to talk right at the magical moment where the boy and the snowman start running across the garden (I don’t waive anything away but let’s just say that what happens next will shock you). At home in Dundee there’s no matinee – the crowd is a bit older, there’s more of a feeling that people have bought in to being there. But for me being there also means forming part of a community. Sitting alongside the same people who you see and you recognise and will never once in your life speak to, knowing you’re there to sit in the dark, to experience and to share a communion.
RSNO Christmas Concert featuring The Snowman, Caird Hall, Dundee, 20 Dec; Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, 21 Dec; Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 22 Dec