View from the Green Room: Christmas Ballyhoo at the Arena
The Adult Youth Orchestra is the brainchild of Barbara Dowling .
If the Finnish football team had heard the big, brassy, ballyhoo opening of Finlandia from the Adult Youth Orchestra of Ireland, they would deffo have been in the Euros. Loud, noisy, inspirational, emotive and lavish, Sibelius’s tone poem boomed around the packed SETU Arena and was the perfect opening for the Orchestra’s fund-raiser for Brain Tumour Ireland. This orchestra is big and brash and boastful. And why wouldn’t it be since it’s packed with former members of the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland – a conveyer-belt of young musical talent for the last half-century in Ireland.
The Adult Youth Orchestra of Ireland is the brainchild of Barbara Dowling following on from the first Christmas in June concert for Brain Tumour Ireland in 2022.
Barbara explains: “A gap in the orchestral market for a successful symphony orchestra – like the Irish Symphonic Wind Orchestra – was obvious.
"While regional orchestras play a part, the notion of building on the success of the National Irish Youth Orchestra was obvious. Hence tonight’s massive orchestra that is the first post-youth orchestra project of its type.”
Their aim is spot on: the gathering of past members of youth orchestras from around the island to perform programmes of quality and innovation.
The concert is an insane concept. “Christmas in June”… I mean??? Granted the weather is probably in agreement with December temps and winds whistling around despite whispering George Lee’s catastrophic warnings about sizzling temps of mid-thirties to come – bring it on, George, bring it on!!! – but tonight’s audience is swaying and clapping along to festivities.
There’s Christmas cards, mulled wine, bells and baubles, 1930s messenger-boy bikes with pressies in boxes, a massive Christmas tree and more glitter than even Taylor Swift could have managed in Croker. And four conductors no less, including local conductors Liam Daly and Kevin O’Carroll, along with Ronan O’Reilly and Dara Pender.
There’s a significant input from the Déise among the players and they all come with a massive musical career in place. Violist Deirdre Scanlon, trumpeter Mark Fitzgerald, trombonist Liam Walsh and Michael Long who played horn. Choir members included Jean Hubbard, Camilla Hayes, Vivienne Walsh and Patricia White. All of the members of the orchestra participated at their own expense and bought their own tickets.
Any programme that features the Dukas “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” is always going to be a winner with me. Dukas based “The Sorcerer's Apprentice” on a poem that Goethe wrote one hundred years earlier, called Der Zauberlehrling, about a sorcerer who can turn a broomstick into a real servant. The sorcerer's apprentice overhears the magic formula and then tries it out. The strings capture all the craziness of the chaotic episode with brass blaring out the warnings before that “put ‘em all back in the box” finale.
“Love actually” features – with more happy endings than even a mass North Korean wedding could muster before the lavish love theme from “Maestro” that featured the enigmatic lothario that was Leonard Bernstein.
The Eastern European ethnic feel of the “Visitor’s Tale” from Tom Hanks’ “Terminal” features on a conversation between clarinet and accordion, before we find ourselves reliving the closing credits of Home Alone as the choir leave us tingling on tinsel chords.
“Chicken Run” keeps the brass happy before we set off on the Yellow Brick Road and then off forth with the “Flying Theme” from ET and that marvellous massive final chord of ascension as the band pulls up the gate, shuts the door and then it’s zoom to infinity and beyond…and the interval coffee.
The Christmas Troika sets off on that prancing, joyful rhythm with bells and harnesses a-jingling… Harry Potter is here with that most identifiable of pinged melody and then here we are in surreal and dreamy Wonka Land with “Pure Imagination”.
I know nothing of John O’Connor’s “Irish Christmas Festival” but I love the magical ballyhoo mix of jigs and reels and ballads that fill the arena with energy and happiness.
“Tara’s Theme” from Gone With the Wind carries all the epic romantic sweep of the cotton plantation caught in the headlights of radical colonial change, before we all chime in with Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas”.
Christmas hats off to the Adult Youth Orchestra of Ireland for a quirky and highly entertaining “Christmas in June”.
