Sydney Philharmonia Choirs | Carols at the House
12 December, 2025, Sydney Opera House, NSW
What a show! Over two and a half hours of entertainment – closer to three – but the time flew by this marathon because there were so many highlights. I swear that I am going to miss some of them because it was just too awesome to capture and remember this experience with pen and paper. As Brett Weymark, our long-serving esteemed conductor himself said, “Lady Gaga, eat your heart out”. This was the concert that you should have attended.
Our supporting cast included Mitchell Butel, Annie Aitken and Alexander Lewis, with many debutants who I will mention later. Mitchell, the artistic director of the Sydney Theatre Company, compered the show between the music pieces, but he did so much more than that. Some of his highlights included a little dance vignette during The Twelve Days of Christmas, and I was absolutely delighted that he sang in the trio for Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
Annie Aitken was the soprano, the descant, the coloratura, the showstopper. She was incredible. From the moment that she slunk onto the stage for Panis Angelicus, I felt like ‘this feels different.’ Her Glitter and be Gay (from Bernstein’s Candide) was the tour-de-force that this show didn’t know that it needed to have! She lived the role, singing, acting and dancing magnificently. Being all over Brett must have been the cherry on top for her as well!
Alexander Lewis was another revelation, because of his chemistry with Annie, and his teasing tongue twisters with the audience. Both Alex and Annie have incredible stage presence but I have to say, I didn’t feel it when I first saw him, because his head was buried in his book, trying to read the words for Cantique de Noel in French. But when he sang the words for O Holy Night in English, his earnest eyes piercing the front row of the audience, his passion and belief overflowing, singing his heart – nay his soul – out, asking us to fall on our knees, this was the most emotional and moving experience of the whole concert.
The choir – three choirs in fact – and the orchestra were undisputedly magnificent. From wordlessly crooning in Away in a Manger to showing off their terrific virtuosity in Bach’s Magnificat (opening chorus), they demonstrated tremendous range in what they were capable of, to the extent that I believe that they are capable of anything. Their highlight piece was the Praetorius Es ist ein Ros entsprungen. We all came back from the interval, and the VOX choir was scattered in the audience. The onstage choir was crooning wordlessly, and VOX sang the words. With two sub-conductors spotlighted at the corners of the darkened stage, it was very haunting.
Speaking of haunting, I need to give a shout out to David Drury the organist. His showstopper was The Little Drummer Boy… meets Bride of Chucky. I loved it!
There were some traditional Christmas carols along with the mandatory audience sing-a-long, Australian carols including a new one by Joe Twist (Christmas in the Sun), a tryptich of musical numbers about children in which Ned Williams made his solo singing debut, two VOX singers made their conducting-in-the-freaking-Syd
But I would like to end this review with a piece that was sung in the first half of the show, that classic vaudeville number The Twelve Days of Christmas. This performance would have been impossible without a conductor, and yet Annie, Alex and Mitchell kept touching him. He bore it all very stoically, just so that he could lead the ‘5 gold rings’. And to hear the 7 variations on these words, well, it was incredible. You just had to be there.
Photo Credit – Keith Saunders
