The 150 musicians performing a Christmas concert in the Gothic splendour of St Paul’s Cathedral on December 7 gave a dramatic heft to the season of faith and festivity. The Kolkata Symphony Orchestra, helmed by conductor Sanjib Mondol, which has been “revived” after 44 years, with its large complement of 50 musicians, presented an excellently curated programme to a packed audience, adding elements from the Calcutta Chorale and the Calcutta International School (Jr) Choir to give it a totality.
A thematic Christmas fare from across the centuries added virtuosity to the tempo and tenor of the programme. There were pieces from the baroque era of Bach, Pachelbel and Albinoni, to the carols of Peter Cornelius and John Ritter, from Cesar Franck’s Sonata in A major— one of the finest sonatas for violin and piano ever written to the evocative number A Million Dreams from The Greatest Showman, an American musical biographical film on P.T. Barnum. A special piece to begin the evening was something that a modern composer Hans Scheepers had — on an earlier visit to this city — gifted the conductor. ‘Little Story’ was presented for the first time in Calcutta and had not even been heard on YouTube before.
The Choral Fantasy by Beethoven ended the programme, but not without a more apt joyous encore piece Feliz Navidad , which got the audience to join in to celebrate the Christmas spirit.
An earlier summer soiree this year saw the first of the concerts from the Kolkata Symphony Orchestra, in a fundraiser where the ‘adopt a musician’ programme gave generous support to the members of the orchestra, which we hope will preserve and continue to grow the rich tradition of Western classical music. And with the Kolkata Youth Orchestra, founded just eight years ago by Mondol, fresh talent can be inducted into the KSO. Slowly but surely new instruments, like the oboe and the French horn, are coming into play.
The chief guests at the function were the new British deputy high commissioner Nick Low, and Paritosh Canning, bishop of Calcutta Diocese of CNI. The concert, incidentally, took place to commemorate 50 years of the formation of the Church of North India.
