Paul Serotsky: What triggers your 'Christmas is coming' feeling?

The "choral" trigger refines itself in step with the passing of time. Photo / Getty Images

CLASSIC NOTES

What triggers your "Christmas is coming" feeling? For me – and no doubt many others – it changes with age. In infancy I goggled at the sudden intrusion, into my normally drab surroundings, of a Christmas tree and sundry other unfamiliar, colourful decorations.

When I was at primary school, pupils were "required" to attend the service of nine lessons and carols at our local church. Even today, the memory of the candle-lit gloom of the then "merely" 800 years old – and freezing cold! – St. Wilfrid's (Calverley), with its massive granite pillars and almost equally massive oaken pews, rekindles my sense of wonderment; and never more so than when I recall the resonant choir and the sonorous, bum-quivering organ.

Decades later, this "choral" trigger was resurrected by many attendances at Huddersfield Choral Society's grand annual Messiah, in spite of knowing that Messiah isn't really a Christmas work and never actually being in the audience, because I was always tucked away in the hospital radio studio, listening (avidly!) through headphones.

Rather fewer years further on, this trigger was pulled again: The first musical performance I heard after coming to Whangārei was (would you believe?) our Choral Society's own splendid Messiah. More adventurous than Huddersfield, WCS prides itself, with some justification, in ringing the changes, alternating a biennial Messiah with different seasonal fare. One year, for instance, they cast their spotlight on Advent – surely the season of "triggers"!

It strikes me, though, that ringing the changes is easier said than done. I mean, you can't just do a "carol concert" every other year. Even if you dress it in a different frock each time, it would still amount to a second biennial groove.

So, they look for other Christmassy choral works to furnish the "main course" preceding a carols-and-other-Christmas-songs "dessert". Unfortunately, "main courses" seem a bit hard to come by. Saint-Saens' Christmas Oratorio worked well, but Bach's ditto lasts fully three hours, whilst Malcolm Arnold's Song of Simeon (an exceedingly off-beat and witty take on the Nativity), requires half a dozen soloists.

This year, however, they came up with a real, glistening gem. Preceding a sequence of songs hovering around the Christmas theme, WCS presented Vivaldi's glorious Gloria, a work whose connection to Christmas is rather more tenuous than Messiah's. Tenuous, yes, but nonetheless real – its one nod towards Christmas is the opening line, setting the Biblical words of the Angel's announcement to the shepherds.

The remainder, a paean to the Holy Trinity, like Messiah ranges from reflective to festive – but unlike Messiah, a fair proportion of which is necessarily grim, Vivaldi's Gloria exudes throughout an Italianate warmth that's very much in harmony with our midsummer Christmas (which, the 12th. time around, still flummoxes me).

Replete with "the playing of the merry organ, sweet singing in the choir", this was indeed a dainty dish to set before the Anglican Church's capacity crowd! Have a good Christmas.