14 December 2022
The Northampton Symphony Orchestra’s Christmas Cracker concert has become a much-loved annual fixture in the calendar which always feels to me like the start of Christmas. I can remember when it still felt daring for members of the orchestra to don santa hats and reindeer antlers for the second half of the concert. These days the whole event feels like a massive fancy dress party - for the orchestra and the audience. This year we were playing Dan Welcher’s narrated piece ‘Haleakala: How Maui Snared The Sun’ - a Polynesian folk tale that tells the story of how Maui captured the sun and caused the summer and winter seasons - so the orchestra’s dress code was Christmas jumpers or Hawaiian shirts. As I don’t own either of these I started searching online and found a wonderfully garish Hawaiian shirt, decorated with tiny French horns. I shared this with my fellow horn players who loved the idea of us all wearing matching shirts. Sadly we then spotted that these shirts would be coming from the United States and wouldn’t be delivered until after the concert. By this time we were all hooked on the idea and determined to make it happen. Rather brilliantly, Callie Scully bought some cheap, fairly plain Hawaian shirts from Asda and printed a series of transfers of French horns which she painstakingly ironed onto the shirts for all six of us. Some of the horns ended up being blue or pink because the transfers quickly used all her yellow printer ink, but we liked the somewhat psychedelic mixture of colours. Callie brought the shirts to our penultimate rehearsal but didn’t bring them into the hall, as we didn’t want the rest of the orchestra to see them until the concert. So at the end of the rehearsal we went out to Callie’s car in the car park where she handed out the shirts - covered by bin bags to keep them secret - and, at Josh’s suggestion we all then split in different directions! This excellent example of ingenuity and everyday creativity was a great success and the horn shirts attracted much praise at the concert. ‘Haleakala’ is a really effective piece of storytelling, excellently narrated for us by John Griff, with the orchestra creating some fascinating filmic audio effects. And I got to start the whole piece by blowing a conch shell which created a beautiful resonant note. Our recent Christmas Cracker concerts have featured lots of film music, alongside the usual festive tunes. This year was a bit different with the programme including an eclectic mix of classical pieces. Our Artistic Director, John Gibbons, had come up with the idea of conjuring up a Christmas stocking, stuffed with oranges (Prokofiev’s suite from ‘The Love for Three Oranges’) and a toy train (‘Pacific 231’ by Arthur Honegger) - though I think he may have run out of ideas at that point. Nevertheless it was a lovely concert at the Spinney Theatre in Northampton: it was wonderful to have a large audience and the welcome return of mulled wine and mince pies for the first time since the pandemic.
