The festive season offers plenty of musical delights, seasonal or not – here’s our pick of the finest
December – a month measured out in Messiahs and Christmas carols, New Year’s Eve waltzes and other musical novelties. There’s no shortage of Christmas cheer on offer right across the UK, in cathedrals and theatres as well as concert halls, but there’s also plenty on offer for festive refuseniks who’d rather imagine themselves anywhere but here.
This month’s top classical events include an evening of orchestral fantasies, one of the great Romantic piano concertos, and soundtracks from the silver screen given gold-standard performances by London’s finest. So, whether you’re more “Happy Christmas” or “Bah, Humbug!”, there’s something to enjoy.
Christmas Music by Candlelight
Touring, 2-22 Dec
Not all carol concerts are created equal. The perfect festive experience requires a beautiful venue (preferably heated, though cathedral-chill can be atmospheric), acres of greenery and candles, and a choir who can find the undefinable mystery as well as the joy of Christmas. Birmingham-based Ex Cathedra are masters of this, and their annual concerts – which travel across the country from Leicester to Hereford and London – are evocative, theatrical affairs, taking the audience from darkness into light with music, readings and processions.
2025’s programme includes poetry by Ben Okri and George Herbert, and pieces by Benjamin Britten, Sally Beamish and Peter Warlock – some familiar, some soon-to-be.
excathedra.co.uk/diary
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra 90th Anniversary Concert
City Halls, Glasgow, 4 Dec
The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra celebrate their 90th birthday in style with the help of some very starry musical friends. Topping the bill is pianist and national treasure Stephen Hough, whose virtuosity always comes spiced with wit and intelligence. He’ll be the soloist in Grieg’s much-loved piano concerto, whose slow movement overflows with intimate, lyrical confessions.
Confession turns to exhortation after the interval. Written during the early years of the Second World War, Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time rejects tyranny and searches for consolation in a powerful mixture of contemporary musical anger and traditional spirituals, pleading passionately for peace. An impressive line-up of soloists includes South African soprano Pumeza Matshikiza and award-winning mezzo Beth Taylor.
bbc.co.uk/events
Bartok and Ravel
Symphony Hall, Birmingham, 4 December
Fantasies and fairytales from conductor Pierre Bleuse and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra this month, in two of the repertoire’s most colourful orchestral soundscapes. Ravel’s 1911 ballet Mother Goose weaves familiar fairytales – Sleeping Beauty, Tom Thumb, Beauty and Beast – together into a vivid, pointillist sequence of episodes, climaxing in a rapturous arrival into a fairy garden. The magic of Bartok’s The Miraculous Mandarin is altogether darker: a deliciously macabre urban fable of prostitution and murder. The very human passions of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto – all fire and longing – break the spell. 2024 BBC Young Musician-winner Ryan Wang is the soloist.
bbc.co.uk/events
Last Days
Linbury Theatre, London, 5-20 Dec
How many new operas get a second West End outing just a few years after their first? Probably the same small number that release a successful single from the show performed by genre-defying American singer-producer Caroline Polachek.
Premiered at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Theatre in 2022, Oliver Leith and Matt Copson’s Last Days was the unexpected hit of the season: moving, poetic, at times outrageously beautiful. Inspired by Gus Van Sant’s film of the same name – itself based on the final hours of Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain prior to his suicide – the opera plays with sound and silence, the everyday and the beyond. Directors Anna Morrissey and Matt Copson create a dreamlike contemporary world, with a little help from Balenciaga costumes and Leith’s hypnotic score.
rbo.org.uk
Wild Arts: Messiah
Touring, 2-18 December
Essex-based opera company Wild Arts have scored a bit of a coup with their Messiah. There are lots of performances of Handel’s oratorio to choose from each Christmas, but none quite like this fully dramatized account, presented in the round and directed by War Horse’s Tom Morris.
Returning for a third year running, and touring to venues across the south of England, Morris’s innovative staging – performed from memory – turns arms-length musical narrative into up-close human drama. An impressive cast of eight young singers, who supply both solos and chorus, are directed by Orlando Jopling, and period-instrument accompaniment comes from the stripped-back Wild Arts Ensemble. This isn’t your usual full-fat choral-society Messiah; it’s something quite different.
wildarts.org.uk/messiah
The Golden Age of Hollywood and Beyond
Barbican, London, 17 & 18 Dec
The Golden Age of Hollywood was also the golden age of the film score, with great composers including Prokofiev, Korngold and Vaughan Williams all trading the concert hall for the cinema screen. The London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano celebrate the pioneering post-war generation and their musical heirs in this musical celebration of all things celluloid.
From the surging romance of Max Steiner’s Gone with the Wind to the elegiac threat of Nino Rota’s The Godfather and the coiled spring of Bernard Herrmann’s score for Hitchcock’s Vertigo, this concert roams across almost a century of cinema, inviting background music into the spotlight, and giving it the five-star symphonic treatment.
lso.co.uk
