Keith Bruce gives Glasgow Hospitals Christmas Concert at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall five stars - here's his review of the show. 

A Block to the West, Glasgow’s Pavilion Theatre styles itself the home of Scottish Variety Theatre, but the city’s newer auditorium was the place where that tradition was being actively preserved in the raising of funds for the charity Young Lives Vs Cancer.

Conductor and musical director Alistair Digges has transformed the annual choral carol singing event into a fast-paced show that still contains plenty of that - and of course a very silly Twelve Days of Christmas with actions that only children can do with any degree of competence -  but much more besides.

A new ingredient this year, and a benefit of one of the conductor’s other gigs, making community opera in Paisley, was the dance troupe right2dance, who contributed their original take on Tchaikovsky’s Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy from seasonal favourite The Nutcracker.

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The classical music side of the programme also included Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla, and For Unto Us A Child Is Born from Handel’s Messiah.

The latter was just one example of the choir being pushed into more demanding territory and both showed the instrumentalists of the freelance Glasgow Chamber Orchestra to advantage. These musicians were happily a baroque ensemble one minute and a West End musical pit band the next.

With a few professionals boosting their ranks, the chorus coped well with the trickier arrangements Digges is asking them to sing, like Roy Ringwald’s version of White Christmas and the Harold Darke setting of In The Bleak Midwinter.

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It featured guest soloists Catriona Clark, soprano with Digges’s Opera Bohemia company, and late-ish jump-in Jeremy Levif, Ayrshire’s most handsome Frenchman returning to the line-up and coping well with repertoire that was a little out of his usual area.

Of course despite all this adult talent, the children stole the show, even when just a handful of them were required to be the stage apron audience for Sally Magnusson’s reading of the Chris Van Allsburg story The Polar Express, when they proved very voluble listeners.

The full forces of Kelvindale Primary School Choir were also part of the Digges move to embrace different music, singing the less familiar Stateside tune of Away In A Manger as well as their own choice of Christmas movie hits.