Christmas Eve 2008 – to the Royal Albert Hall for a concert of Christmas carols, at the invitation of Heather M. We meet for drinks beforehand in a cosy pub around the corner. As I sit down with our glasses of wine, she presents me with a present – one of her burlesque stockings with satsumas and chocolate coins inside.

The man at the next table leans over with his pint. ‘Your Christmas stocking, I take it?’

And we start chatting.

‘We’re off to sing carols in a minute,’ Heather says.

‘So are we. We’re the choir.’

I’m rather taken aback by this. The man seems utterly without ego, showiness or preciousness in the slightest. Just the sort of pint-drinking bloke in a jumper you’d expect to see at a pub table next to you. What I suppose I’m saying is that he doesn’t look like a professional classical musician.

‘Oh really?” says one’s conscience. ‘And what SHOULD a professional classical musician look like, eh? Are you sure you’re not confusing formal stage wear with personality? You just haven’t thought it through.’

No excuse in my case for this petty preconception, either. In my Bristol Old Vic days I use to socialise with theatre musicians – the ones in the ‘pit’ – all the time. They were as down to earth as non-showbusiness employees of any kind, bar merchant bankers. Like most jobs, classical players have to get on with large amounts of strangers for large amounts of time. Any loftiness, egotism or snobbery would mark them out as bad at their job, and so cost them work.

In fact, it’s artists in the rock and pop world who are more likely to be stand-offish and precious and full of themselves. They may dress down on stage, but are much more likely to be buttoned-up as people. It’s not really their fault, though. The trappings of the genre encourage a brat mentality, and all too often talent is equated with ego.

It works the other way too – there’s too many naturally gifted singers and songwriters neglecting a career that could have been, purely because they don’t want to be thought of as vain. “Musical success? Me? Oh, I couldn’t. I just like singing in the shower.’

I’m told artists on the contemporary folk scene are more like classical players in this regard, with even the biggest names steeped in disarming modesty when approached off stage. ‘I’m just doing my best to play the music’ is the default attitude with folk and classical musicians. Better that than ‘I’m in a rock band – aren’t you lucky to be in the same room as me?’

***

The Royal Albert Hall carols show features the Mozart Festival Orchestra, complete with harpsichord-playing conductor and the full ensemble decked in 18th century period dress: wigs, breeches, stockings, the works. Period detail means the female musicians in the orchestra have to drag up in male costume, while the lady soprano gets a billowing frock.

Along with the carols, they do excerpts from Vivaldi’s Gloria, Handel’s Messiah and Samson, and Zadoc the Priest. ‘Zadoc’ always makes me think of its brilliant use in ‘The Madness Of King George’, where the piece’s dramatic choral entrance – written for the anointing of a coronation – is matched to the moment the King is strapped to a chair and gagged.

A carol concert is not a carol service, though, and it takes a fair amount of cajoling from the conductor to get the packed Albert Hall audience to join in with the singing. My only trouble is following the tunes to the two less familiar carols on the sheet: ‘It Came Upon The Midnight Clear’, which I only slightly know, and ‘Unto Us Is Born A Son’, which I’ve never heard in my life until tonight.

I’m reminded how much I love the Sussex Carol. The one that goes ‘On Christmas night  / all Christians sing / de dum de dum / de dum de dum.’ That one. There’s also a couple of readings by an actor, who I recognise as the husband from the TV series ‘Tipping The Velvet’. A role memorable for the line ‘You need a man for that, I think you’ll find.’ He reads the end of ‘A Christmas Carol’, and the nativity section from the Bible.

Afterwards we go for hot chocolate at the Natural History Museum’s ice rink, and watch the fetching young stewards in charge (one looks like that boy from the TV series ‘Merlin’, the other that boy from the movie ‘Twilight’), who, in the moments when they’re not helping novice skaters to stay upright, casually show off their pirouettes.

Tags: carol singing, Christmas Eve, Heather M, ice rink watching