Gubbay lights up Christmas (and sets a Show Boat afloat)….

There isn’t a producer quite Raymond Gubbay. Since he has built his business empire out of the popular end of classical music promotion – exemplified by the Classical Spectaculars, complete with indoor fireworks and lasers, that routinely sell out at the Royal Albert Hall for each of the multiple times they play there every year, and he is now shipping around Europe, too – this is his busiest time of the year. Indeed, you could call this good Jewish boy – who next year will celebrate his 40th year in the business – Mr Christmas; this year alone he is presenting 150 festive classical concerts around Britain, including 18 at the Albert Hall and 15 at the Barbican.

But though his typical repertoire is sing-a-long carol evenings and carols-by-candle night, he also spies commercial opportunities in the offbeat, too, like promoting the London Gay Men’s Chorus concerts at the Barbican on December 21 and 22 (Make the Yuletide Gay) as part of his schedule there.

And though he made a rare business mistake in promoting an unsubsidised “People’s Opera” company at the Savoy for a short-lived season a couple of years ago, he has also found a strong niche for ballet and opera audiences by staging spectacular arena productions of both genres at the Royal Albert Hall over the last decade that together with his concert runs, means that his company is now the hall’s biggest annual tenant after the Proms. In February, his in-the-round production of Puccini’s La Boheme, directed by Francesca Zambello, will have a return run.

Yesterday he announced plans for a bold new production that seek to bridge the gap between opera and musical theatre, as ENO did last summer with its staging of Bernstein’s On the Town, by now producing a massive in-the-round staging of Kern and Hammerstein’s 1927 Broadway classic Show Boat, with Zambello again at the helm, next June, for an 18-performance run at the Albert Hall. Peter J Davison’s set, with the audience wrapped entirely around it, looked spectacular in the set model shown to the press: a giant hanging model of a showboat can be raised and lowered from the rafters of the Albert Hall, and there’s water surrounding the playing area.