★★★★☆ This Christmas cracker offers something more substantial than the usual festive fare.

Melbourne Recital Centre
December 5, 2015

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, and all around the nation orchestras and ensembles are preparing to ring in the festive season with that obligatory annual fixture, the Christmas concert. One of the first out of the blocks this year is also one of the most consistently popular: the Australian Brandenburg Orchestra’s Noël! Noël!

While concerts of Christmas music are expected from most classical groups, they can all too often be deathly dull. The same pieces, with their northern-hemisphere centric depictions of frosty winds and bleak mid-winters, are predictably trotted out, programmed for their nostalgia and ubiquity rather than any musical merit. Yet this beautifully judged programme from the Australian Brandenburgs was a very welcome display of how festive themed performances needn’t be a cookie cutter affair.

Of course there were the seasonal favourites of the traditional carols to round off this programme in rousing fashion, but before this Artistic Director Paul Dyer offered an abridged history of music written to celebrate the birth of Christ. Beginning in the early...