Crouch End Festival Chorus
London Concert Orchestra
Jonathan Cohen - Conductor
Sophie Louise Dann - soprano
20 December 2003

Christmas Carol Singalong

BY Roderic Dunnett (The Independent)

Christmas concerts are a right royal circus: and you won't easily find a bigger big top than the Royal Albert Hall, or a ringmaster as canny as conductor Jonathan Cohen, the former wizard of TV's Playschool, who whipped up the kids like a wicked Sauron for Raymond Gubbay's Christmas Carol Singalong. "Hello, you on the shelf," Cohen calls to the back rows, some four storeys up; and blithe as a bobsleigh, we're off.

It helps to bill surefire hits, and - as the LSO chorus proved with John Rutter's version next day - I Saw Three Ships rarely flops. Here Cohen did his own arranging, and good it was too. This was a dazzling programme, complete with a terrific young soloist, Sophie Louise Dann, a characterful crooner belly dancing in pink who could see off Kim Criswell and Ruby Wax, and whose unsmug rapport with the audience - and Cohen, crooning over the keyboard like Richard Rodney Bennett in a rapt cabaret daze - made for bonhomie galore. Have yourself a merry little Christmas was just divine.

A top-notch Crouch End Festival Chorus mastered Albert's famously crippling acoustic to cap their LSO rivals. Dann's demure take on a prepubescent choirboy's Once in Royal David's City was hilarious. Time for Good King Wenceslas: "I want the girls to sing 'Sire, he lives a good league hence' in a sort of pathetic tone," begs Cohen, pathetically. They duly oblige, as gruff massed men demand their hogsheads.

Irving Berlin's White Christmas and Jule Styne's Let it Snow! scintillated; Cohen's gorgeously bizarre fusion of He's Got the Whole World with Go, Tell it on the Mountain made Gospellers of us all. Winter Wonderland wooed, Santa came to town, Bob Cratchit's family got fed, and all was right with the world. Thanks to Gaffer Gubbay for a corker of a show.

Thanks to The Independent for this review.