'CHRISTMAS comes but once a Year', so we are told, though the impression is that the season, certainly commercially, starts earlier and earlier.

There can be little quarrel, however, with Trowbridge Operatic Society's decision to present A Foretaste of Christmas in the Civic Hall on the last day of November and the first day of the Christmas month.

This 'Foretaste' was a new venture. Anthology and pot-pourri are inaccurate labels, though they each give something of the flavour. It was an evening of song and verse - an evening thoroughly enjoyed by a packed Saturday night audience.

The mulled wine and mince pies of the interval separated two contrasting halves; the dark, austere atmosphere, created by the black of stage and costume, relieved only by discrete flowers and the cast's red folders, skilfully and unobtrusively used, giving way to the colour and glitter of a light-hearted second half.

Regular followers of the society are well aware of the quality of its singing, and here in a dozen carols, beautifully performed, there was great control in both the softer passages and the full richness of the fortes.

Only - and that almost inevitably - when the chorus was entering or exiting from four different directions, separate from one another, and hidden from the musical director, did the ensemble work falter briefly.

The exacting demands of stage work, when there is nothing to be said, sung or done, showed the cast at its very best: waxwork-like in its disciplined immobility, concentration and focus. There was a further pleasing dimension to this cast of nearly fifty, for while every soloist was a member of the chorus, it appeared each of the latter was a soloist.

Producer Deanna Capper put together a show that not only flowed, and looked and sounded good, but was full of opportunity, promise and freshness, following a policy that all should display individual and corporate talents.

In a varied programme of forty items, including the traditional ingredients - almost literally in Ros Davison's Christmas Pudding à la Mrs Beeton - as well as the more contemporary, there was so much to please. From the opening Wassail Carol to the closing Gaudette were carols, songs and readings to suit all tastes.

Dickens was a must, and Peter Stone's Christmas Carol did not disappoint. In Goodwill to Men there were no less than eight Pam Ayres, each replete with rural Oxfordshire accents. Extracts followed from the words of John Betjeman, Victoria Wood and Sue Townsend, and Glan Davies gave an authentic reading of Dylan Thomas' Ghost Story.

Most moving, perhaps, was Tina Foxon's The Innkeeper's Gift, which left not a dry eye in the house and Joan Francis admirably recalled the much-loved Joyce Grenfell in her Nativity Play.

The lightest moments were immediately after the interval. The dinner jackets of the first half were replaced by tutus, tinsel and wands as six would-be Danny La Rues told of every little girl's secret wish to be a Fairy on a Christmas Tree, and though their Dance of the Cygnets may not have struck fear of unemployment into any watching members of the Royal Corps de Ballet, it did cause Joyce Pascall no little difficulty while relating the problems of a fairy past the age of forty.

The hilarity was continued as Pat Davies fluently compered a parodical mini-pantomime, Snow White, in which Gustav (Tony Lomax) and the dwarfs got most of the laughs and Queen Ermyntrude (Kath Cowdroy) the hisses. Community carols gave further opportunity for audience participation.

It was, however, in the choral carols that the society as at its very best - the lilting Lullay My Liking, the ringing Carol of the Bells and the ebullient calypso De Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy giving particular pleasure. In these high-lights, and throughout, David Luckett's baton was always in control, supported by the sensitive and skilled accompaniment of Tony James.

This evening was further evidence that Trowbridge has an operatic society of which it can be justly proud. A word of advice: book your seats early for Brigadoon in May.

[Contributed]