WHAT a "glorious" start to Christmas at Christ Church in Skipton, on Monday evening, December 12 by Skipton Building Society's Camerata.

The performance of Handel's Messiah was the culmination of a week long indulgence in the masterpiece led by Skipton Camerata's founder and conductor Ben Crick and various members of the orchestra and choir.

The Long and Short Messiah involved Crick and a handful of musicians taking a cut down version of the oratorio to introduce it to school children in Craven.

And if those youngsters felt just half of the uplifting experience the "grown-ups" enjoyed when it was performed in its full splendour then they should have been hooked on Handel.

Christ Church was packed, evidence of the oratorio's popularity and Crick and lined up top soloists in Joanne Dexter, soprano, Hannah Mason, mezzo soprano, Nicholas Sales, tenor and Mark Saberton, bass and a young choir that I must say, despite wonderfully powerful performances by the soloists, stole the show.

Anyone who might baulk at the work's purely religious theme - it tells the story of Jesus Christ from his birth to resurrection - should suspend their disbelief and when Camerata do it again , which surely they will, grab a seat, open the mind and wallow in the sound and spectacle.