28/12/2025
As the Christmas glitter settles and we reflect on 2025 and think ahead, here is the press release from our Christmas Concert. Your support with our nomination would make our new year. Link below.
“KIRKCALDY ORCHESTRAL SOCIETY
Fife's Community Orchestra Making Music since 1875
Seasonal Stories and Songs 2025. KOS and guests, The Langtoun Singers.
Sunday 14th December 2025
Once again, the Old Kirk in Kirkcaldy was packed out twice, this time on Sunday 14th December for Fife's Community Orchestra, KIRKCALDY ORCHESTRAL SOCIETY's two performances together with THE LANGTOUN SINGERS - two required to satisfy the audience clamour for tickets and tickets sold out four weeks in advance. With 120 performers and 200
audience at each sitting, the venue was well filled!
The 68-piece orchestra drawing members from across Fife, Glasgow and Perthshire and conducted by Graeme Wilson was joined for the occasion by the 50 voices of The Langtoun Singers, conductor Ella Wilson, Narrator Sandie Blair, with appropriate and colourful digital images from Anne McIntyre.
The KOS 2025/2026 Season theme is one of lighter music - ‘On the lighter side’, the performances starting with the season theme music, the 20th Century Fox Fanfare familiar to film fans, and a snippet of The Devil’s Galop, originally used as the theme music for the BBC’s Dick Barton, Special Agent
radio series, setting the scene for the afternoon performances and creating a warm and welcoming atmosphere for music making of the highest order.
This was the second of KOS's programmes in their current season.
In keeping with tradition, KOS offered a story with music – this year a return to a topical favourite, Paddington Bear with his First Concert the storyline, that created by Michael Bond with iconic music by Herbert Chappell and narrated expertly by Sandie Blair.
Other music included a work new to the orchestra’s repertoire, A Short Fantasia on Christmas Carols, The Parade of the Tin Soldiers and Leroy Anderson’s Sleigh Ride.
Christmas carols were in evidence too, with a new set of sing-along items allowing a mass vocal and instrumental 'raising of the roof'.
The Langtoun Singers contributed to the afternoon with their own performance of three songs – While shepherds their flocks, the gospel number Mary, Mary Had-A But One Child and the contemporary carol by John Gourlay This Child.
KOS recently entertained shoppers in Glenrothes and Kirkcaldy with some carol playing meanwhile collecting £650 for Macmillan Cancer Support. To that sum was added the proceeds of bucket
collections at the conclusion of each Sunday concert with the magnificent total of £1,100 to be donated.
Sunday’s performances – and the printed programme – contained news of the orchestra’s exciting shortlisting for the Inspiration Award at the Royal Philharmonic Society’s 2026 ceremony in March that year. The award is decided by public vote and all support will be welcomed: visit
https://royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk/awards/rps-awards
KOS and the Langtoun Singers can be heard again soon in Community Classes at the Fife Festival of Music in the new year.
The Orchestra's next full performance will be ‘Famous stories brought to life in music’ on Sunday 22nd March 2026 in the Old Kirk, Kirkcaldy at 3pm, featuring the first performance of John Gourlay’s Old Kirk Concerto no. 6, Concerto Piccolo, with soloist Craig Steedman, Les Miserables, Miss Saigon, Gershwin’s Suite American in Paris and Guilmant’s Morceau Symphonique with Grant
Charleston, Euphonium.
Meanwhile, the Langtoun Singers present 'Music in May' on Friday 29th May 2026 in the Old Kirk at
7.30pm.
Graeme Wilson
MD and Conductor, Kirkcaldy Orchestral Society
18 December 2025”
Click ‘Introduction’ to read about 'the biggest night in UK classical music' (The Sunday Times) and how to get involved.
