Music For Busy Brains: December 2025
- Heather Bingham
- Dec 9
- 6 min read
Updated: Dec 13
I don’t really do Christmas music.
I play one Christmas concert a year, which is always good fun (this year the front desk will be trampling on their own authority by donning deeply uncomfortable antlers). However, Classical Christmas can be a dreary affair. This year, our choir has decided to inject some “culture” into proceedings and, for me, it could not be worse: Handel’s Messiah. Oh Lord, please kill me now.
Whilst the singers will be gustily waffling their way through it, they may not realise that a sizeable chunk of the audience will be dying inside. These are people who have come for Boston Pops-style Hollywood themes, Sleigh Ride, and to watch their children puke from over-excitement and too many Haribos (last year – true story). They have not come for culture.
People who don’t know much about classical music – or simply don’t care very much yet – do not tend to enter the fray via Handel, Mozart, or even Beethoven. My husband doesn’t attend many of my concerts (this saves a fortune in ticket purchases), but he will come along if I can promise him plenty of bang and crash, with real light and shade. He still remembers enjoying a Shostakovich symphony – probably No. 5 – from several years ago.
An uninitiated audience wants wonder, emotion, and a satisfyingly rattling tam-tam. They do not want to sit through musicians knitting their brows over a great slab of musical mathematics. So rather than thrust Bach or Handel upon you this December, we’re going for programmatic music: orchestral works that tell stories. Nothing Christmas-related in sight – unless it was used in Die Hard. So many things were used in Die Hard.
This month’s playlist is united by a single thread: programmatic music – orchestral works that tell a story. It is a mixture of tone poems and symphonies, and it firmly sits in the category of “music I love to rehearse and perform”. There is very little repetition – certainly no insidious passage that must be played five times in case the audience missed the full boredom the first time round. Some pieces need a bit of narrative context to help you catch the themes; otherwise, the tonal colour alone evokes the landscape.
Leoš Janáček – Taras Bulba
ChatGPT wrote of this that it is "a tone poem of the bold, bracing variety". I realise sometimes that my ear is "off", because all I hear is great engaging music where every bar grips the ear. But this conductor, Charles Mackerras, must have agreed with me, because he championed Janacek throughout his long career. I've also chosen this recording because the leader's solos are perfect, but also because of the very tasty speeds in places (which we didn't quite manage as amateurs.....)
Based on Gogol’s historical novel, Janáček depicts the tragic fate of a 16th-century Cossack warrior and his two sons in their battles with the Polish. One son dies in the first movement, the second is executed in the second, and Taras himself goes up in flames in the third. It is not cheerful – but it is thrilling, visceral writing. The trombones are Taras Bulba and they go for it - fully aggressive.
I have to report that from the middle of an orchestra, the moment the organ enters (18:40) is sheer heaven. We had an electric organ at the weekend - no choice when playing in a glorified cow shed - and it made the place shake most satisfactorily!
Janáček is best known for his operas (Jenůfa, The Cunning Little Vixen) and I have enjoyed seeing them on several occasions, but Taras Bulba is such a joy to play that I’m left wondering what more he might have given us orchestrally.
I first performed this in around 1992 with Essex Youth Orchestra in Thaxted. Last Saturday I found myself on stage with two others who played in that same concert – my friend Nicki (now sitting opposite me in the cello section) and Matthew, who conducts. If you’re a parent contemplating hobbies for your children that build deep, lifelong friendships, music is very hard to beat.
Ralph Vaughan Williams – Symphony No. 7 (“Sinfonia Antartica”)
This symphony began life as the film score for Scott of the Antarctic (1948, starring John Mills). Vaughan Williams later expanded it into a full symphony, premiered in 1953 – and the material more than earned the elevation.
Expect ice, wind, bleakness, and a general sense of hopelessness, with a bit of misplaced optimism in between. Ladies voices, including the soprano solo, are used purely as another instrument - they are the icy, eery wind. I've chosen this recording because said ladies are from the choir I used to sing with, the London Symphony Chorus. Some of the ladies I sang with in the 2010s will be on this recording - choir members are incredibly loyal when they aren't really violinists masquerading.
Vaughan Williams wrote nine symphonies; I stand firmly in the camp that loves Nos. 4, 6, 7 and 9 – works that contain anger, despair, melancholy and other very recognisable human emotions. Some prefer his lighter, pastoral style, but I find parts of it too twee. I like a composer who tells it like it is.
As for Scott himself: as I child I thought him a tragic hero and wept at the film's denouement. As an adult I came to realise that in the final reckoning he was something of an idiot, and he and his companions died ignominiously because he didn’t heed sound advice. Adulthood can be cruel! Vaughan Williams captures that blend of heroism, hubris and tragedy beautifully.
Josef Suk – Symphony No. 2 (“Asrael”)
A new favourite – and it has arrived with force.
Matthew Andrews (yes, the same Matthew) has learned to be very careful about mentioning works he suspects I don’t know. I immediately start campaigning to have them added to the concert schedule. Asrael will be no exception.
Asrael is the angel of death in the Old Testament and in Islamic tradition the carrier of souls. Suk wrote this work as a tribute to his beloved father-in-law who had died, Antonín Dvořák. But as he composed it, tragedy deepened: his wife Otilie (“Otilka”), Dvořák’s daughter, also died. Their marriage had been unusually harmonious by composerly standards – Puccini, for instance, used to go duck shooting to escape his hated wife – so Suk was devastated.
In the tradition of great artists, he poured everything into the music. The result is, I think, a perfect Romantic symphony: essentially Mahler, but with more Czech passion and fire. It is a monumental stuff, and I love it.
Hector Berlioz – Symphonie Fantastique
Many people love this piece, but I came to it embarrassingly late. My friend Daniel was evangelical about it – one of his A-level set works – and when you analyse a piece for an entire term you either fall in love with it or swear never to hear it again. It's early for me - I assumed I didn’t like it.
And then I played it.
The heavy Beethoven influence is obvious, particularly in the first movement. But because it is programmatic, Symphonie Fantastique is darker, more colourful, more psychologically vivid than Beethoven’s symphonies.
Its full title – Episode in the Life of an Artist … in Five Sections – says it all: a descent into despair, narcotic delusion and death. Misery? Darkness? Sign me up.
As a violinist I’m a glutton for punishment; I love an exposed, quiet first-violin line. Yes, it’s glorious to dig in when brass and percussion are thundering away, but the real satisfaction comes when you have to hold the line together by a thread.
If you’re short on time, go straight to the fourth movement (you’ll recognise the theme). But the magic lies in the finale, the notorious “Witches’ Sabbath”. As Wikipedia neatly puts it: “The artist’s reveries take him to a ball and to a pastoral scene… which is interrupted by a hallucinatory march to the scaffold, leading to a grotesque satanic dance.”
Anyway, the score calls for four harps. What’s not to love?
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