At exactly 6.15pm yesterday (Monday 17th), John Brunning introduced the now annual Classic FM/Making Music Christmas collaboration to showcase “the most talented amateur musicians” in the UK. If you missed the live broadcast, you can catch up using the Classic FM player (we’re on about 1hr 11mins in) – but be quick, as it is only around for seven days!
From a “torrent of entries” this year, Making Music had selected an initial long list of 10, then narrowed it down to the final five, one of whom would be featured at 6.15pm every evening this week.
We had chosen, as our submission to Making Music, Kenneth Leighton’s beautiful and haunting arrangement of the 16th century “Coventry Carol”. It is a lullaby sung by the mothers of ‘doomed’ children, and was traditionally performed in Coventry as part of a mystery play called “The Pageant of the Shearmen and Tailors”, depicting the story of Herod’s massacre of the innocents. Brunning described our performance as “excellent”.
We won’t know till the end of the week if there are any other ensembles from Scotland, but we have at least the satisfaction of knowing that Scotland was represented again – and “excellently”. We were also delighted that Brunning didn’t forget to namecheck our two splendid soloists.